Surely You Can Be Serious

Unserious people might seem free, unburdened by the dreadful commitment of caring about anything. But they are in fact hackable and distractible, susceptible to whatever game can trap them in a behavior loop.

Meanwhile, some of the most serious people I know do their serious thing gratis and make their loot somewhere else. My dad, whose photographs sit at the top of every Experimental History post, quit his job at the newspaper and went to work as a postal carrier instead. Why? As he puts it: “I could afford better lenses delivering mail than I could ta... See more

I played the game pretty well for a long time, and now it’s obvious to me that the reward for playing the game is more game . You just keep unlocking levels forever, and the levels don’t even get more interesting (“Ooh, this one is in space!”). It’s just the same thing over and over until you die. You don’t get out by winning ; you get out by stopp... See more

If you love someone, for example, you don’t settle for marrying their cousin.

Seriousness is like that: it allows you to hear the one important thing when the whole universe is screaming at you

So seriousness isn’t some kind of final reward, a golden watch you earn for a lifetime of operating in bad faith. It is, instead, one of those basic practices you gotta do to prevent your life from disintegrating, like getting out of bed and taking a shower and talking to people. That’s because seriousness is the great Orderer of Priorities, and th... See more

That day, in the lecture hall, none of us were serious. We were all doing a little pantomime on the theme of science. The speaker pretended to show us some results and the we pretended to think about them. As long as we all hit our marks and said our lines, the content didn’t matter—one week you’re doing “Guys and Dolls” and the next week you’re do... See more

Meanwhile, some of the most serious people I know do their serious thing gratis and make their loot somewhere else. My dad, whose photographs sit at the top of every Experimental History post, quit his job at the newspaper and went to work as a postal carrier instead. Why? As he puts it: “I could afford better lenses delivering mail than I could ta... See more