Why We Should Laugh At Hell
NYC subways. Optimization. Physical training. Used books
SEAL. Writer. Dispatches on meaning, figs, dogs, nature, and human nature.
The modern world offers us a gift: a war for self, agency, groundedness, and meaning. It is also a gift to fight this war with others of like mind. I have gained a great deal of wisdom from Mark Twight over the past two decades. We were direct messaging about a topic we both share a passion for, and he wrote a stellar essay on it. I am still thinking about it and I highly recommend it. You can find it here: Physical Experience Matters
On! On!
1. Laughing at the unhuman
I was reminded recently of how much I love walking on New York City subway platforms. There are a handful of platforms that offer the chance to experience the perfect confluence of factors. To the front and rear of me are ascending concrete stairs with no view of what lies above. Above me is a grey concrete ceiling with digital screens dangling and displaying timelines. If the moment is just right, to the left and right of me are two metal and glass trains barreling down the tracks in opposite directions. The sound is of a thousand hammers and anvils in a narrow iron mine. The sight is of a blur of silver and flashes of light illuminating immobile humans who are themselves reduced to blurs, stripped of individual humanity. I smell concrete, urine, steel, and paint with my nose, and cordite, sand, and sweat with my mind. I walk in the middle of it all.
I feel as though I am a futuristic gladiator on a stage in front of an unseen stadium filled with virtual spectators here to witness a fight to the death. It has a Homeric flavor to it, and comes with a divine, godlike feeling. I become aware of my lungs cycling air, my veins pumping blood, and the sparks within the cerebral matter within my skull—but above all, in response to the unliving structure all around me, my head leans back and I laugh. A satisfying, abdomen convulsing laugh. Every slab of stone and metal, every speeding minute, every pixel—none of it compares to that rebellious little human spark that can laugh and say No in the face of manmade inhumanity. All I can do is laugh on that narrow platform.
What, then, is left but to laugh at all that stands in our way in our short time here?
2. Optimizing ourselves to (living) death
Influencers have existed for as long as we have been human. But never before have they been so ever-present on account of the internet, and never before have they been filled with so many scientific truths and half-truths, on account of progress, and a perhaps too little exposure to life-and-death situations. It is becoming clear we are witnessing an inflection point: the profit is increasingly outweighed by the loss of a crucial—and primeval—element of the human experience.
Basic recommendations can come across as gospel. For example: Thou shalt get eight perfect hours of sleep each night or thou shalt surely increase your risk of cancer. Thou shalt complete twenty minutes of zone five heart rate training per week or thou shalt surely develop dementia. Thou shalt buy this mattress woven through with electrical cables that will keep your body the perfect 65º for only $8,000 (remember to use my discount) or thou shalt surely become another statistic in all-cause mortality.
Many of the practical recommendations are gold; the impractical, on the other hand, are suicidal. For if we listened to every recommendation proclaimed on our airwaves in the infectious and practiced optimism of salesmen, we may be left with a dilemma: either we stress ourselves out to the point we, ironically, die early in our nail-biting efforts to live longer, or we actually do make it to one hundred without ever having lived a single day.
A question: at what point does the fact we can die tomorrow supersede the commandments to sacrifice guaranteed life today for potential life when we are a hundred years old? If we can die tomorrow—and we can die tomorrow—why would we spend two seconds unnerved that we only slept four hours when we can focus on making that day the best day of our lives regardless?
3. Physical training as primeval practice
Physical training offers us two ways of viewing negative energy: a primeval way, and a modern way. I was doing Skierg intervals with kettlebell snatches. Every muscle from my neck, to my fingers, to my calves was flooded with liquid fire. Purple hued blisters formed at base of both my index fingers. But my mind was more complicated. As my body moved through the movements, my mind split itself into two radically worlds.
The first world was this exact moment in time and the will to overcome the discomfort. This world is alive, problem-solving, grounded in the sweat and pain of here-and-now. The second world was the mental image of my day before and after that session in my gym. My mind latched onto what was irritating me from earlier that day, what I was worried would happen later that day, and what I was craving to achieve several years in the future. It is this second world that got my attention because adding the weight of negative energy to an already difficult task is, arguably, insane.
At first glance this struggle within my skull always seems to add zero value to my effort. And yet on deeper reflection the benefit physical pain offers us is what makes strenuous physical activity a human nonnegotiable in the modern world.
Let us do a thought experiment and say the maximum weight of water and wood a man can carry up the side of a mountain is one hundred pounds. If he does not have wood and water on his back, and the weight of his negative energy weights thirty pounds, he can carry that negative energy uphill all day. He can be anxious, angry, and complain every day until he dies. But if he is carrying one hundred pounds of water and wood up the side of that mountain, it is impossible to carry the extra thirty pounds of negative energy. It is a stunningly clear binary. The primal positivity that follows verges on the divine.
As with every session, I skied until the effort was so great I faced the choice: I watched the second world vanish, and with it, every last ounce of negativity. Physical training is to voluntarily implement a primeval way of life into a non-primeval world; to voluntarily decide, via discipline and choice, not to carry the burden of negativity the modern world allows us to carry in its benevolence; it is, in a word, to cure the disease of ease.
4. A dead man’s library
I mostly read and buy old books, the average age of which is over fifty years. My favorites are those with handwritten notes in the margins. I see images in my mind of home libraries full of books stacked floor to ceiling because the shelves are too full, each one dog eared by the dedicated lifelong reader, each inked up like a sailors drunken tattoos or a prisoners desperate etchings on a cell wall, and whose owners are probably dead. I can see the family packing up the books and selling them, maybe keeping one or two as a memento.
A question inevitably rises: what was the point of all that reading and note taking during a life? All those hours, burnt out lightbulbs in a favorite lamp, pens emptied of ink, brains stretched so far to the conceptual limit they physically hurt and the thinker cannot sleep for hours after? In a few hundred years those books will be dust. Their former owners may not even be a memory. It is really a question that circles back on us, because our books will also end up in someone else’s hands when we no longer exist, our ink side by side with even older ink.
My hunch is it is a discourse with the ages; a shared unquenchable curiosity to recon the most extreme conceptual edges of human understanding; to talk to Homer, Sophocles, Epictetus, Boethius, Hugo, and Jünger; to satisfy that ancient human need to know; in a word, to savor this brief bit of life we are blessed with—and to laugh at the hell and the heaven found in each and every day we are given.
"But if he is carrying one hundred pounds of water and wood up the side of that mountain, it is impossible to carry the extra thirty pounds of negative energy. "
That is a metaphor for our time. Not so many generations ago, few people could escape the daily challenge of basic survival. How many people who are working daily to survive spend the evening asking "Why am I here?" Such questions are the province of people who sense no purpose.
A good friend and mentor of mine recently died earlier than he should have of cancer. And while I mourn the loss of a friend I mourn more the loss of the knowledge and insight he carried in his brain. It’s gone. Sure parts of him are carried as memories diffused among a small population. It’s like the books you described, his friends and colleagues are notes in the margins. Soon, sooner than those books you've described, disappearing as dust into the past. What then?