Phil Nguyen

I started to realize that there was ALWAYS a reason why people were acting in ways that were confusing to me. When they did something “confusing”, it was because I had a specific mental model of what their incentives/desires are, and I never updated that model when I got new information .

People were my new puzzle. Every time someone said something that I thought was crazy/irrational, I got excited: it was a new clue about a world view I can’t (yet) predict!

can I predict what their reaction will be to what I say? why would a reasonable person disagree with my position? if I am so smart, and they are so dumb, why can’t I use my intellect to understand what they’re stuck on and convince them?

[Trump] cobbled together a coalition of the wacky and weird. But being weird in America is kind of normal. It’s a very weird place. A lot of Americans belong to cults or odd religious sects, practice alternative medicine, participate in strange fandoms, wild fads, and peculiar enthusiasms. And with the decline of mass culture and the fragmentation ... See more

There’s a difference, of course, between caring deeply about quality and being excessively critical! But this instinct to critique my own work, to understand what fell short and fix it —that’s the divine discontent. Personally, I find that it’s genuinely fun to live like this. It makes life interesting! It means there is always something to care ab... See more

To me, divine discontent is about cheerfully seeking out dissatisfaction. It’s choosing to ask, What could be better? What can I improve? It’s a feeling that practitioners across many fields—in literature, art, music, performance, film; but also the sciences, engineering, and mathematics—can relate to.

Applied literature helps not to decide, but to think, to see, to name, to know, to understand. If we want to know the world we must see it for what it is, not for what we want it to be, believe it ought to be, and not through the lens of our own dispositions and beliefs.

Rather than offering direct lessons about the modern world, literature is an indirect guide to life. There is no simple way in which we can interpret modern politics with Shakespeare, but we will find again and again that he had named so much of what we see today, and that those names are useful companions in the struggle of thought.

This idea is familiar to psychology, too. To remove a fear, you first have to name it. To purge a repressed emotion, you must give it the right label. One friend tells me all the young women she knows spend hours discussing Sally Rooney novels and in this way are examining their romantic lives more closely than they ever would otherwise. Another re... See more

Literature allows us to name the world by giving us new phrases, new characters, new words. Poets like Chaucer and Shakespeare coined hundreds of new words. So many of their phrases are still used in common speech. They named all sorts of things for us. And by using those names, we expand what we can understand about the world.