The point I’m making here is that a lot of the hype around “thinking machines” and artificial intelligence seems to be Team Descartes, ignoring that he got it really, really wrong when it comes to what it means “to be.” To that end, one of the amazing and disturbing things about living in the world today is the word “algorithm” has made its way into so many places. Most people know what algorithms do. An algorithm probably decided that you would be reading this post (or not) based on whether the words in it triggered some key words that suggested it might be interesting to you, and so it popped up in your social feed or search engine results or whatever. Algorithms decide what you see, watch, read; they steer you toward what to buy and where to invest, they decide how much to charge you for insurance, how to win baseball games, prosecute wars, catch welfare and tax cheats; and even whether you’re an efficient enough worker not to get fired.

But an algorithm is just a complicated mathematical model…

Anthrorusticaphobia is an extreme, irrational fear of rednecks. Yes, a real word for a real phobia. It’s a fear the United States, particularly its growing urban, coastal, well-heeled populations, needs to confront, a fear that I blame in significant part for what happened yesterday. I’m not a therapist, but I know the first step in confronting a fear is admitting you have one. The second is figuring out where those fears come from and what makes them extreme and irrational. The third is finding a treatment plan that includes “exposure therapy,” or coming to terms with those fears by actually changing your perception of, and interacting with, the cause of them.

Part of this idea of “strong” means to be unafraid—unafraid to stand up for what is right, to defend oneself and others, and so on. But I am afraid of a lot of things. And so are you. Being afraid isn’t weak; at the most basic biological level, it’s being alive and wanting to stay that way. Like pain, fear is information about the world that guides you to pursue some behaviors and avoid others. Working out and anything else that’s challenging involves enduring physical discomfort, but pain is also your body warning you of its physical limits. If I don’t listen to my body, I will hurt myself, and in middle-age I don’t heal as quickly as I used to, meaning I have to gauge the “right amount” of pain during exercise. Too little, and I’m not challenging myself. Too much, and I’m going to risk injury and will not be able to work out at all, perhaps for weeks.
Similarly, the trick with fear is to make sure that fears are proportional to the actual risk posed by some hazard…

I am a very sensitive person. I am so sensitive I once punched someone in the face for calling me sensitive (more on that later). I have been bullied, harassed, ridiculed, threatened, and stigmatized—both as a child (for things I’ll get into in a moment) and as an adult (mostly for writing things like this). Being sensitive is a touchy subject if you’ll forgive the terrible pun; it might make a short list of things that people find desirable in a friend or a mate, but it might also make one an object of ridicule and even hatred today…

There is a reason I tell this story, besides getting something personal off my chest or challenging stereotypes. A lot of this comes down to time and how I used it. Since I quit social media back in November, followed more recently with deleting numerous games and apps from my smartphone, I have noticed many disturbing parallels to when I quit partying in terms of how my life has changed. I think about what my late academic advisor and friend Ben Agger wrote over a decade ago about how smartphones were changing the ways we interacted with each other, how we perceived time, and even our biological rhythms and cycles. He called it iTime, a blurring of boundaries between private and public, of work and leisure, of day and night. It has, consistent with his theories, unfolded as a constant battle for “eyeballs” or attention which has the effect of “dopamining” society, as philosopher Gerald Moore has recently discussed, in which the machinery of profit-making is turned ultimately on hijacking the reward-mechanisms of the human brain via increasingly sophisticated technological interventions (i.e. “screen culture”).

I do not believe. That is a complete sentence. I am not a nihilist. In fact, no one is a nihilist because nihilism doesn’t make sense—to attack, or defend, a viewpoint, you have to have standards of truth (what is), morality (what ought to be), or both—the very things nihilism is defined by rejecting. What I mean is that as soon as I discover a new idea inspires or fascinates me, I set to work trying to figure out how it might be incomplete or wrong.

When I’m having trouble making sense of things, I re-read William James’ (1842-1910) essay The Will to Believe. James was a U.S. psychologist and philosopher who wrote and spoke on topics from psychedelics to suicide to the scientific method. The Will to Believe is about religion, directed by James, a Christian, at an increasingly secular and agnostic Ivy League culture. To be clear, I’m not promoting or criticizing Christianity here; I’m sharing thoughts on James’ work because it offers me comfort in making tough decisions.