Selected Consumptions, May-Jun 2025
It got too hot too quickly, but I can’t tell whether or not this is mainly due to climate change or because of the inescapable acceleration of time. It feels like a month ago I was still slipping on gloves and a hoodie to jog outside. Now I’m slathering my face with sunscreen, melting in the soupy air, and apprehensively checking the weather lest a scattered thunderstorm suddenly materialize in the sky and obliterate me.
One way in which I’ve been thinking about the phenomenology of time passing is via a very simple information-theoretic lens (disclaimer: I have not taken any courses in information theory). The gist is something like this: each day there’s some set of events that could happen, each with some probability. If an event has a relatively low probability, but occurs, we say that it has high surprisal: a priori, we wouldn’t expect it to happen for the day, but it did. It is surprising to observe! (Mathematically, the surprisal is defined by the negative logarithm of an event’s probability of occurring.)
An event’s surprisal is also referred to as the information it conveys. A way to build intuition here is to say that the more surprised we are, the more we learn: perhaps witnessing this event lets us update significantly about the state of the world we’re in, or lets us know that there’s more inherent unpredictability to prepare for. We are rendered less able to predict the future, assign structure, or settle down. If you believe that, then it isn’t too much of a stretch to claim that this notion of information correlates very well with how much “time” we believe has passed. The more we have to process new or varied events over a time, the more space that time will take up in our head. Put another way, high-entropy environments are memory-expensive.
It’s no surprise, then, that especially diverse times of life, on all timescales, feel like they last a lot longer compared to the quotidian. It’s feasible, too, to argue that the perceived length of a lived experience in the moment is inversely proportional to its remembered length in retrospect. If your days are chaotic and there are constantly strange happenings to respond to, then you won’t have much time to take a breath and actively think about time passing; the hours can fly by. Yet looking back, once memory has crystallized, those periods of time often seem to be the longest.
On the flip side, days with high structure can feel like they drag on forever, because you know what you’ll have to do, how long it’ll take, and maybe how menial it’ll be; you’re mentally primed to absorb every unit of time that passes. And because your days were so organized, they merge together and become a compressible lump of continuity. (Of course, there are caveats: a jam-packed schedule can lead to exhaustion in more ways than one, in which case certainly you’d feel the length of the day. But I think the general rule is true.)
My first half of the year has been accompanied by considerably more structure than not, and I can’t tell if this is good or bad. I’ve learned to savour the form of fulfillment that comes from those steady commitments, but that fulfillment comes soaked in a temporal mush that makes me a little worried that when I wake up tomorrow I’ll be in my 30s. Maybe all of this is to say that some more travel or picking up some new hobbies might be good for me. Tough, though, given the evergreen allure of city life. I guess in general I could afford to increase the variance in my life—but hopefully only along the axes I want.
Like most, I am a recreational doomscroller. While following the news over the past weeks and months has been, to not overstate things, dispiriting, it has also come with pieces of commentary that I have found rather insightful for illustrating and explaining our current political milieu. Dan Williams breaks down populism psychologically, framing it as fundamentally an emotionally-charged act of status inversion, the trend of elevating “common sense” above cerebral expertise, hooked onto spite-filled steroids. n+1 has two powerful portraits of the emerging immigration-industrial complex from its polarities: one reporting from the bleak house that is the Manhattan federal immigration court, less than a mile from my apartment, and another, at the absolute opposite end of things, describing a blithe job fair for ICE. The government’s headstrong cost-cutting efforts, and in particular their offensive on science and research funding, feel intentionally disruptive (maybe an extension of the “war against experts” mentioned above), and short-sighted to say the least.
Yet there is (or was), too, some intellectual strand behind the tangled right-wing consortium that powered the 2024 election. One particularly influential voice on Substack therein was that of (pseudonymously-named) N.S. Lyons, who has since put the platform on hiatus (to go work for the state). Any one of their essays illustrates well the ideological exposition they excel at, two recent examples being their positioning of individual freedom as vital rebellion to the leviathan of managerial bureaucracy and their fierce case against the tech-right’s philosophy of contractual corporate dominance, arguing that it runs contrary to the traits of patriotic love and nationalism they find necessary for humanity. With the volatility we’ve observed, though, I’ll reckon the intellectual vibe, if there remains any, behind right-wing politics will continue to shift month to month, maybe, for instance, to a more classically Mishimian Sun and Steel-style point of view.
As AI continues to automate and lubricate every part of our lives, like it or not, one of the most worrying trends I’ve seen on online discourse is that it will become a de facto substitute good for thinking. In a way, AI is a tool that can supercharge the homogenization and sterilization of our cultural capital, a positive feedback loop that was already chugging along. We are no longer even creative enough to regurgitate variants of hero’s journeys, and forget about long-form literary fiction for that manner as well (long-gone since the end of the 20th century, as this article claims); we’ve reached a point of post-ironic degenerate nihilism. When friction has been all but eliminated, so will our need for critical thinking. Slop and strange attractors will drive the evolution of entertainment, and human experience shortly after, into its destined final form: instantaneous grey goo, the ultimate reduction of art to bytes, pure data, the lowest common denominator, a pure commodity for grifters to profit from.
I’ve written about this sort of flattening in previous roundups. And similar to the message I argued two months ago, I’d say that consumption, remind you, is a choice, after all. If skill has been solved, what remains for the time being is still taste. (And fun little edge-cases like poker, apparently.) We can use our taste and intuition to draw us back into the kinds of irrational frictions that elevate our joie de vivre. The flip side, of course, is creation, and we should do more of it. Tyler Cowen says he’s writing for the AIs now. Sure, but it ought also to be sufficient enough motivation just to write for ourselves. It’s not that deep, you don’t have to overthink it. Even if your largest audience is the many versions of yourself in the future, that’s a compelling enough reason. Like we’ve learned from the old Romantics, failures can enlighten us later, and even if they don’t there’s bliss in trying: activities without quantitive objectives are an excellent way to carve yourself out of the status trap of always being busy. Even bullet lists can be great, as this Experimental History brain-dump, on writing itself, illustrates.
I was fortunate enough to stumble upon a couple works of translation available online, including two of Banu Mushtaq’s short stories from her latest collection Heart Lamp, which received the International Booker Prize this year, both revolving around ritual as a central element—one that delves into the loss of innocence, another that portrays the haunting spectre of guilt. I liked The Dial’s account of the legacy and impact of the Argentine cartoon character Mafalda, whose Calvin and Hobbes-like comics are finally being published in English. I enjoyed reading through this fascinating exploration of a fabled train-hopping guide and the hidden world packaged with it, a piece of vanishing modern lore, and E. Tammy Kim’s virtuosic narrative of the “late afternoon” of middle-age and the passing-on of elders a world away. On a completely different note, as a relatively-junior developer I found the grug-brained developer guide and the egoless engineering manifesto to be delightful combinations of technical insight and acrid humour.
Finally, I came across the Icosian Reflections blog, written by a former quantitative trader, and found it a bona fide exemplar of the best that the trading–altruism–rationalist–etc. ethos. See, for instance, his explainer on the trading game Figgie, and his profound and heartfelt eulogy for his friend Max Chiswick. I suppose I’m also presently in this space, and know well that peeling back the veil can be difficult in such a secretive industry, so I found blog rather refreshing. At its core, trading is simply about making good decisions in expectation, but there’s a surprising amount of intellectual depth that underlies that statement, technical and also otherwise. The kinds of lessons and nudges you internalize from the work you do and environment you’re in act slowly, have impacts that reverberate well beyond just your career, nudge you towards a different shape of person completely; if anything, that makes reflection all the more crucial.