Brain Damage and Goethe

with continual reference to Sam Hyde's Podcast

There is a clip from Sam Hyde’s podcast where he talks about how he cured his back pain. “There are a thousand different sources of back pain,” he says. “If you look up how to fix it online, you’ll never get a straight answer. So you’ve got to fix it yourself. It’s a long journey. Do not get discouraged. Every morning, you have to get up and rededicate yourself to solving this problem.” I listen to clips of his podcast pretty often. I like to listen to podcast clips and other nonsense while I cook or clean after work. I like to distract myself. I do it very often. But unlike other podcast clips I have mindlessly consumed, that sentence has stuck with me. Every morning you have to get up and rededicate yourself to solving the problem.

The moment we invented windowed multi-tasking operating systems was the moment the computer was transformed from a tool to be used into a device designed to obliterate your ability to act. Computers started as command lines, text prompts that could do a single thing at a time. The windowed graphical interface was invented, but at first the computer could still only run one program at a time – programs in the background were paused, and only the one on top was actually running. Later we invented true multitasking, so the computer could switch between multiple programs and have them all run simultaneously, and that was it. You didn’t use the computer to accomplish a single thing at a time anymore – now it was used to do many things at once. You could edit a document, do math on a calculator, and read your emails simultaneously. Now we carry around this multitasking machine in our pockets, and through it filters our whole lives.

I remember the first time I saw a notification appear on my desktop computer. To me it was an insult. It was vulgar. You would distract me with such stupidity even here? The computer was where I worked, where I did serious things, not a frivolous distraction machine like my phone. Immediately I began searching for a way to disable notifications on desktop. I left them off for a while but eventually I needed desktop notifications, for MS Teams and work-related software, and I gave up and turned notifications back on. What can you do. I remember once on a new machine trying to launch python from a command terminal and being flashbanged by the Windows Store appearing. If python isn’t installed, it launches the store and asks you to download the python app. In my mind, there was an absolute division between the command line and the Windows Store. They existed in utterly different realms, divorced from one another. You download apps from the Windows Store. Apps are for people who can’t use computers. Python is a programming language, interpreted, very easy to learn, sure, but far closer to the machine than an app. Apps are for plebes, for the uninitiated. I am trying to program. I am talking directly to the machine. Apps are inherently unserious. And yet, from the black monospace command line, nearly unchanged since MS-DOS in the 80s, the Windows app store had appeared, with its bright modern user interface and big buttons asking me to install now.

I am not here merely to rant about “technology bad.” I do think it’s bad but that’s been said mant times already. What I would like to point out instead is the massive and rapid adoption of software practices that are designed to “make things easier”. We have spent the past 40 years of software design trying to make things easier for people who do not understand the computer. I believe this to be an absolutely fatal mistake. Not because I am an elitist, but because “making things easier” has been interpreted as divorcing the user from the machine. Layering stacks of abstraction between what the user sees, and what the computer does. The result of this process is a population utterly illiterate to the machines that rule their lives. It is akin to the Middle Ages when only the priests and the lawmakers could read and write. The user is not allowed to see the machine. Clinton The Geek wrote an excellent article about that very process and its history here, which I highly recommend.

I would like to focus on two design decisions, multitasking and notifications, and their effect on the world. I would like to talk about the division of our attention. My thesis is this: the modern world is designed to divide and dissolve your ability to think, to hold your attention to a particular idea, to a particular task. The goal of the system is what it does: what our systems do is divide our focus until nothing remains.

An obvious example of this is shortform content, TikTok and Reels and YouTube Shorts, and these have been much discussed. I think those are mere surface level. I’d like to suggest that the destruction of attention goes far deeper than that, into the very core of the design philosophy behind the multitasking systems we use every single day. Having many things running simultaneously. Pop-ups and notifications and buzzes and noises that obliterate any kind of focus on a single task. Merely the ability to do many, many things at one time is enough – things like short form content only follow from this. They are a symptom, not a cause, of the problem.

This medium with its inherent division of focus spawns new content to fill it. The podcast is popular because you don’t have to pay attention to it. It is background noise. Shortform content is popular because you don’t have to think while it plays. Its job is to distract from whatever else you could be thinking about, from the myriad of other ongoing tasks that you are asked to focus on. They say we are in an attention economy, but that’s not true at all. The goal of all these media is to avoid having to pay attention to anything at all. The goal is the atrophying of our attention. Continuously listening to music as you walk down the street, listening to Sam Hyde podcast clips while you cook or clean the dishes or go to the gym. Subtitles so you don’t have to actively watch; you can read to catch up on the first part of the line you just missed. Listening to album after album while I sit at my desk at work. It’s like I’m not even there. When someone asks me what I spent the day working on, sometimes I can barely remember. This piece is also a confession, I too am a sinner; I watch Instagram reels every day.

We can pontificate about who wants this kind of dissolution of focus, and for what purpose, big tech, big government, or maybe it’s the terrible, unplanned price of our technological Faustian bargain. We can try to figure out the culprit, but I don’t think it will do us any good. The problem would still be there: the inability to focus, the inability to remember, the formless, empty days that seem to pass us by in a blur. The fragmentation of all kinds of thought, a sickly anxiety when not continuously stimulated. Coffee, nicotine, music, voices of other people talking in your ear. A kind of brain damage. The problem is still there. Look it up online and you can find a thousand different sources. You have to solve it yourself. Every morning you have to get up and rededicate yourself to solving the problem.

You probably agree with me up to this point. This kind of thing has been discussed before, with much wringing of hands, and the general sentiment towards the end of these articles is that we should try to “focus more” and “live in the moment.” These very thoughts are expressed by countless anxious young people in thinkpieces, YouTube videos, TikToks, expressed in mediums designed to hold as little of your focus as possible. That is, if these sentiments were a threat to the system they wouldn’t be talked about everywhere and all the time, but they are. I would even say they are encouraged, because knowing is the opposite of acting, and by knowing that we have a problem, we never have to change.

What these articles never discussed is that we want the destruction of our attention. We are perfectly content with it. The lie is that we are being passively manipulated by some grander force. We might be, sure, but knowing who and why would do nothing. The truth is that we put in the earbuds ourselves every time we step out of the house. No one is forcing us. I certainly want to be distracted. It is easier and far more pleasant to be distracted than to have to think and experience. It is easier and far more pleasant to listen to someone talk, someone intelligent and funny, than it is to stare at the dishes and clean them in silence. Even if I take the headphones out, I daydream. It’s compulsive. I’ve always been like that, since I was a little kid, a “very active imagination”. I would stare out the car window and not realize that we had arrived at our destination because I was in a different world. In grade school I used to hide a book under my desk and read in class, and so involved was I in my stories that I wouldn’t notice that the class had moved on to a new topic. Once in fourth grade a teacher played a joke on me – we were headed out of the classroom to gym class, and I, reading under my desk, did not even notice my classmates standing up. She told everyone to be quiet and leave the room. So absorbed in my book was I that it took twenty minutes before I realized everyone else had gone, and I remember looking up, bewildered, wondering where the class was. It’s a funny memory, but I think it says a lot about me.

I knew even back then that this was as good a thing as it was bad. That my daydreams were so intense, the stories were so real to me, was a gift in many ways. It was also a problem. Whenever I had to do something boring or uninteresting, I would simply disconnect from the real world. I would start washing the dishes, or doing yard work or what have you, and I would drift off. I was happier existing in my own mind. An hour later I would finish my task and I would remember none of it. You could probably call this a coping mechanism or something like that. I would disagree. I would call it vice; a kind of resentment, a kind of hatred for the real world. Reality is real, and I was eschewing it for an imagined, better one. I recognized this about myself early on and I have worked to force myself to be present in reality, to pay attention. There are a lot of things that have helped. Physicality has helped tremendously. I always loved sports as a kid for the way they forced me to be present. Later, when I started lifting, I realized that it is hard to disappear into your head when there is a barbell heavier than you over your chest, that will kill you if your attention slips for even a moment. But even still it is every day a battle. I want to slip away into daydreams. You have to wake up each morning and rededicate yourself to solving the problem.

I said that the goal of the design of our modern technological systems was to atrophy our ability to pay attention and to disconnect us from the world. Atrophy is not merely a metaphor. Attention, focused thought, focused will is a muscle as any other. If you don’t use it, it will atrophy as any other.

My point is that this escape from focusing, from being present, is something we desire. It is not an evil forced upon us, but something we willingly choose, willingly go back to, because it is easy. Sinning is easy. The system is evil, yes, but the system is not an omnipotent entity, the system is how you, collectively we, want. The computers would not be designed this way unless it was something that we wanted. Why don’t we want to be involved and engaged in reality? Why do we want to be distracted? When you focus on the world you are responsible for it; when you apply your full focus to a task, it cannot be meaningless, it has to matter. “Meaning” is no longer a concept – there is work to do, so you set to work. It is easier not to be responsible; responsible means that it is up to you. Responsibility implies a duty to the world, and duty is something we wish to avoid. There is nothing more complicated about it than that.

You can think of it the same way you think of the progressive concept of a “nation of renters,” “you will own nothing and you will be happy.” A man who rents, who does not own his home, does not care for it. It’s no responsibility of his, only a temporary resting place. Things can go wrong, things can be ugly, and all at once he is both powerless to fix them and indifferent to their fixing. “It’s the landlord responsibility; besides, even if I wanted to change things, the place isn’t mine to change.” A man who owns land, on the contrary, is invested in it. He has the power to change the world around him, he cares for the wellbeing and organization of that world, it is his responsibility and his pleasure to arrange everything to his liking. When the renter sees a hole in his fence, he thinks, “not my problem,” and continues along. But for the owner, it is immediately a problem, it is his problem; no one is responsible for solving it but him. The renter sees this as a detriment, a headache, but herein lies the secret joy of the owner. Where the renter is without power to fix the hole, even if he would like, the owner can mend the hole, he can paint it so that it is pleasant, he can tear down the fence if he desires; everything necessary to improve his condition is within his immediate power, if only he has the will to achieve it.

When you live in fantasy, you rent out your life. It’s not yours to change as you see fit. When you focus, when you are present – especially in those most painful, boring moments – you own your life, both the good parts and the bad. And you are responsible for it. And most importantly, by owning your own life, you are able like the owner of a home to change it.

The fracturing of our attention has a single goal: a nation of renters. A world where no one is present, where the moment to moment matters not a jot, where you pass through life as in a dream. You remember nothing, you feel nothing; the days and weeks slip by, nothing makes an impression. You live in the ideal rather than reality. “Washing the dishes isn’t my real life; my real life is elsewhere, it is far more interesting. If I was on this podcast, with these guys, I would be very funny and cool. They would want to be my friend.” This first thought leads to the next: “I am better than my real life. I am special. If only some other omnipotent entity – these cool and funny guys on this podcast, for instance – recognized how special I am, they would affirm to me that this, here, right now, isn’t my real life, but that my real life is somewhere else, far above me. I am far too interesting and clever for merely washing the dishes.” You wish not to make your own life, but to be included in someone else’s.

By focusing on the world – by focusing on the life you live, your moment-to-moment existence – it is reaffirmed that it is your life, for which you alone are responsible. Living is something you have to choose to do at every moment. When you are responsible for your life, you are also responsible for the broader world. Herein ideas like “civic duty” are born, for it is hard for a man who feels responsible to the world to walk past filth and misery each day and not try to improve it. Today the lack of instinctual civic duty is constantly bemoaned, everywhere, but duty to the world has to begin with duty to one’s own life, to one’s own immediate surroundings. And that starts, I think, by paying attention.

Capitalism is marvellously efficient, it gives you exactly what you’ll pay for, nothing more, nothing less. What we want is to numb our lives so that we can forget living them. I want to reiterate that I am not good at what I am preaching here. I never have been. This piece is a confession. I don’t remember many days because I don’t live them. I float through them, like a dream – but not my dream, someone else’s, not my house, someone else’s. I only rent. Deleuze says somewhere that if you are living in someone else’s dream, you are fucked. When you daydream, are they your dreams, or are they images from TV, collaged snatches of scripts written by other people? Someone else’s jokes, someone else’s clever insights, someone else’s one-liners? You’d rather these over your own memories? Is this what you want for your life?

When Odysseus visits the land of the dead, he meets many of his fallen comrades. When he meets Achilles, he says to him that he should be glad, for in life he was honored by men like a God, and now in Hades he rules over the dead as king. Achilles bitterly rejects this consolation. The dead are but shades of the living: Achilles, the greatest hero who has ever lived, says that he would rather be a slave on earth than King of the entire underworld.

Life at any cost over its shadow.

“I get profit from a philosopher, just so far as he can be an example to me.”

-Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator

I’ve been reading Eckermann’s “Conversations with Goethe”. I started reading it casually, at first, at work on my lunch break to pass the time. Conversations with Goethe sounded to me like a 19th century coffee table book – something pleasant to flip through, happy sayings from the happiest of the Germans. I was wrong. It is a far more important book than that.

Conversations with Goethe makes you at one and the same time proud to be a human being and ashamed of yourself. Proud beyond belief that men can be so well turned out, that a human being like Goethe has existed; ashamed of how far you are from him. I will try to spare you the long paragraphs of hero worship I might write here, for such writing is always more for the gratification of the writer than the edification of the reader. But Conversations has struck me deeply, and I ask that you forgive my indulgence when I tell you about Goethe.

Rilke wrote a famous poem about how the beauty of the statue of Apollo compelled you to change your life. How there was “no place it does not see you.” This is how it feels to read Conversations with Goethe. You are presented with a nobility in a human being that you have never encountered in the real world and in this light your own flaws become so glaring it is hard to look at yourself. You look to Goethe in astonishment; Goethe gazes back out from the book, he sees you in all your naked barbarity, and you are ashamed. There is a grandeur in Goethe I have never met on earth. A nobility, a civility, that has maybe not existed for hundreds of years.

Supposedly Nietzsche called Conversations “one of the greatest German books there is.” I haven’t found an attribution for that quote, but I believe that Nietzsche would have said it. This was made clear to me by my reading of Schopenhauer as Educator, one of Nietzsche’s early essays. What is striking to me in this essay is that it isn’t Schopenhauer’s ideas that were interesting to Nietzsche – it was how he lived and how he wrote. Nietzsche spends the whole of the essay writing about Schopenhauer the man, about Schopenhauer as stylist, as author, as a human being. Rare is the mention of his philosophical ideas - what truly impressed Nietzsche was the way Schopenhauer lived. For instance, his fearlessness, his refusal to be deceived, to be lied to, by himself or by others. This made Schopenhauer a famously unpleasant man around others, but this unpleasantness was the heroic cost of not allowing himself to be lied to. This was the kind dedication to the truth Nietzsche was looking for. He wanted a mentor he could emulate, and in Schopenhauer, he had found such a mentor. From Schopenhauer’s writings he took not ideas, but the characteristics of the man, how he searched for the truth, how he held himself, how he thought.

Nietzsche was not looking for philosophical ideas on which to base his own, he was searching for a great man at whose feet he could sit, from whom he could learn to think and live. He was searching not for a why, but a how. This is something of a strange notion – would it not be the ideas that we are after in a philosopher? But Nietzsche understood that the man is the fertile soil in which those great thoughts are produced, and as such it was his demeanour, his way of thinking, his way of speaking, even his diet and physiology that must be emulated. This is a conception of philosophy that reaches back to Greece, where the philosophers were judged not merely on how they thought but how they lived, for it was in their lives that their thought was most strongly expressed. Knowledge for the sake of action – knowledge so that we can act with the apprehension of Gods on earth.

As with Schopenhauer, so with Goethe. At first blush I thought that nothing important could be contained in Conversations as it was not one of Goethe’s own works. If I wished to know Goethe, wouldn’t I have to read his novels and his plays? Certainly so; but Conversations captures the man who could produced those works in stunning detail. It is in the mundane, in the moment to moment, where Goethe reveals that nobility, that steady flame of power that burns within him. We see a man for whom all events are profitable, for whom every moment is useful and precious. We witness the faith of a man for whom everything has been redeemed, everything can be affirmed. Everything is within his power. There is a conversation in the book where Goethe reproaches Eckermann for not having visited a certain family of distinction over the winter, where he could have met many interesting people, and learned a great deal from them. Eckermann says:

“My disposition is so excitable, my sympathies are so strong and ready, that too great a multiplicity of new impressions is burdensome and hurtful to me. I am neither by education nor habit fitted for general society. My situation in earlier days was such, that I feel as if I had never lived till I came near you. All is new to me. Every evening at the theatre, every conversation with you, makes an era in my existence. […] I have had all I desired this winter, from the theatre and your society; other connections and engagements would only have disturbed my mind. I carry always my feelings into society; I like or dislike I feel the need of loving and being beloved; I seek a nature which may harmonize with my own; I wish to give myself up to such a one, and to have nothing to do with the others.”

“This tendency of yours,” replies Goethe, “is indeed likely to unfit you for society; for what would be the use of culture, if it did not teach us to modify and control our natural tendencies. Tis mere folly to hope that other men will harmonize with us; I have never been guided by such motives; I have regarded each man as an independent individual, whom I might study, and whose characteristics I might learn to understand, but from whom I must not expect further sympathy. Only in this way have I been enabled to converse with every man, to obtain the knowledge of various characters, and the dexterity necessary for the conduct of life. For it is by conflict with natures opposed to his own that a man learns to show himself a man. Thus only can the various sides of the character be brought out, till it attains a certain completeness, and the man feels sure of himself in opposition to any and every man. This is what you need. You can do so, if you please, and, indeed, there is no evading the great world; you must find your place in it, whether you will or no.”

For Goethe, every encounter is useful, every moment a profit – to quote Emerson, all days are holy, all men divine. It is here expressed that quiet power of Goethe – what is for Eckermann an impossibility, the burden of meeting with unsympathetic minds, is disintegrated in a single sentence: you can do so, if you please. That sentence could be the watchword for the entire book.

When we talk of cultural decline the culture we really mean is lived culture. The cultural decline is the loss of a way of living. When we say we live in a dark age, it is not a dark age where records are lost and books are not kept. It is a dark age where the living tradition of manners, civility, nobility have been lost. We have lost the method of living nobly. Knowledge we have in abundance, in superabundance, and if the last hundred years have taught us anything it is that knowledge has made us only more brute, more animalistic. It is not lack of knowledge that we have, but lack of method - we lack a method for leading noble, graceful lives. We need a means to live. Not a why, but a how.

For Goethe every moment held worth and value. Eckermann spends nearly every day with Goethe as a private secretary of sorts and an intellectual confidant, and in the book records their daily conversations. Throughout the book, Goethe writes, he travels, he becomes sick, he meets with nobles and soldiers and washerwomen alike, he sits in palaces and in regular homes and outdoors in the grass, and always, from each moment, he takes something worthwhile. In his little comments on the day to day the noble way he looks at the world is revealed. He meets with everyone with pleasure, he talks of grand projects, of the politics of the day, of literature, of different nations, of science, everything is interesting to him, everything holds his attention. He is always thinking, his mind is always at work, and yet he does not, like I do, turn into himself and retreat from the world, instead the opposite; I have never seen an image of a man so firmly involved in the doings of earth as he. His mind is in the heavens and yet both feet are firmly planted on the earth. He loves the world. He does not need to escape it.

I believe this way of living is something that can be learned. Goethe wrote extensively about education as character formation, about bildung and how it can be achieved. Wilhelm Meisters Apprenticeship is a novel whose main subject is the cultivation of a young man into civilized, noble human being through art. However, we lack living examples. We lack mentors. There are very few who live nobly now; most want only to escape from their own lives. We have the tools to do so. It is far easier.

I propose that this way of living can only be found now in the long dead; that to recover it is the work of a lifetime. That the brain damage we incur in our daily lives, like back pain, can only be remedied by concentrated, willful work, every day. It is a physiological problem, but it can be fixed. Every moment is precious for it. It will not be easy. It will be a long journey. You have to wake up every morning and rededicate yourself to solving this problem.

We are barbarians in a dark age, gazing at ruins and wondering how men could possibly have achieved all this. But as barbarians, our one virtue is to steal. It is from educators like Goethe that we will steal, from whom we must reassemble something dead and unknown from broken shards and flotsam and wreckage. I believe it is possible. If there are no living mentors, we must become what we require. In an illiterate age we must revive the dead language. We can do so, if we please.