After the Orgy

It's time to quiet down

Everything we might say has already been said, including this sentence (along with its final clause and the parenthetical that follows).

This is great fucking news — it means we can quiet down for a minute and take stock. Looking back at the centuries of endless writing and talk, capping off with the frantic orgy of text, audio, and video of the past few decades, and the player-piano ride-along of the LLMs and AI images of the past years.

We can finally take a deep breath, look back for a second, and assess: so what was that all about?

---

I made a discovery a few months ago. Some kind of conservation-of-energy principle that applies to insight.

In short: when an insight comes to you, you can either let it flow through you, or you can hold it inside yourself. These have different effects.

Letting it flow through you looks pretty familiar, especially to me. My years of endless tweeting and writing articles and courses and guides — I was constantly prying myself open into a channel for insights to flood through. It went pretty well for me, honestly. Kept the rent mostly paid, brought new friends to my doorstep, got me a reputation as The Guy you go to with certain types of questions.

Holding insight inside looks a bit less familiar, because it’s not the kind of thing you see. That’s kind of the point. The insight comes, and instead of pouring it out, you hold it in your chest, in your cells, in your behavior and relationships. Over time, the insight gets built into you. It’s not the kind of thing you think about anymore, until something reminds you “oh wait, I forgot that was a thing some people don’t know.”

It’s not quite true that these two options are mutually exclusive. But it’s true enough to be worth saying in this context.

After holding and incarnating the insight, you may or may not later feel an urge or duty to communicate it. At that point, after it’s become a part of you, it seems to be safe to write about.

But before that point, the conservation of energy thing applies: the energy you channel through communication is energy that isn’t soaking your tissues and re-shaping them into an embodiment of the insight.

In other words, your tiktok rant about boundaries is leeching the energy that would otherwise instruct your very marrow on the craft of boundaries.

---

Which isn’t to say that staying quiet is always an integrating move either. If I’m quiet, I may just be too scared to speak up, or forgetful and dropping the insights entirely when I fall into a youtube rabbit hole.

The move here, at least what I’ve found to work so far, is to feel the discomfort and buzzing in my body, the sense of too-muchness and intensity to what I’ve just realized. Feel it in my body. Feel how much I want to understand it, not as a word or an idea, but as a pattern I can live by automatically. Something natural, inherent to the way I carry myself.

Feel also how much I want to vent that pressure — to text someone about it, tweet it, record a short rant and put it up on youtube, write a breathless substack article about it. Feel how uncomfortable it is to just stay with the potential, stay with the pressure, stay with how my body feels as I hold that potential against the current reality of who I am. And keep holding it there, while I go about my day, my week, my meals, my conversations, my work calls. Hold it there, like wind pressing harder and harder against a sail on the inside of my chest. Let myself start to feel where that wind wants to take me. And keep it to myself.

---

What I’m saying is, essentially, a form of heresy. The attention economy demands my rants. I’ll never pay the rent if I’m not a shining mote in the infinite scroll, if my name isn’t written in that algorithmic Book of Life.

Who will know my name if I embody insight in silence? Who will want me if I’m not an avid contributor to our glorious orgy of content?

Who will ever take me seriously if I don’t gut my insights and spill their viscera on the page? What good is nobility without a bestseller?

---

The glut, the orgy, the recitation that comprises our whole literary and philosophical tradition — I think we can all just take a break.

This is, for my money, one of the problems at the core of western philosophy — everyone is channeling insights, no one is embodying them. The incentives are to write your philosophy as it comes, not to live by it and then communicate it once you are it¹ (if it still feels relevant by then).

This is true on the reading side as well — everyone lets their eyes scan over insight after insight, they give a good hearty golly gee! impressive brain-work mister hegel!, and they move on, letting the insight stay firmly in their head, a delightful curio to trot out when there’s an argument on the internet, or a cute grad student at the bar.

---

A month or two ago, I reread some of my older essays and journal entries. It was… weird.

Over and over again, I had an experience of reading a line I’d written and essentially doing a spit take. How did I write that back then? I thought, I know for a fact I didn’t know that yet.

That’s most of my writing, honestly. It has stood out to me a number of times that whenever I write something, I seem to be writing it for myself 6-10 months in the future. The next time the insight tried knocking on the door, to see if I could live it yet, instead of writing it.

Whatever I wrote, it would feel so right and the words would fall into place like planets aligning. The whole process would distract from the fact that I had no fucking clue what I was talking about.

Then later, after I’d gotten hit on the head with it enough times that I was forced to just sit and be with it, it would finally start to sink in. I’d finally look back at that old paragraph and go “oh, that’s what was trying to build itself into me; and I kept just spitting it outward instead.”

After this experience, I recognize the same dynamic in so much other writing. In What I Talk About When I Talk About Writing, Haruki Murakami marvels over F. Scott Fitzgerald, asking exactly this exact set of questions. How, Murakami asks, how did Fitzgerald know all this so young? How did he write with such wisdom and understanding in his 20s?

It feels similar to me with many writers and thinkers — but I often marvel at the disconnect. How someone can write such pure wisdom and insight, and then fail so utterly to live it, or to seem wise in their life, in their relationships, in their interviews.

It’s because the glut, the orgy, the recitation, the infinite scroll, the demand to produce content to know you’re worth anything — it incentivizes us to vomit our insight outward rather than letting it digest, rather than letting it quietly become part of who we are at core.

This incentive is remarkably clever self-preservation. Because — and this is important — if we had a society of wise, quiet, insightful people… the current culture we live in could not possibly survive.

---

After

So if we all take a breath, what comes next?

I keep seeing frantic articles on AI, reminding me that if I don’t start building something right now and setting up my future with AI coded projects, I’m going to lose everything in the next 6 months. If I don’t find a way to use these grand finales of text and content to make money, I’m doomed. I have to speed up. I have to go faster. I have to put in more effort than I’ve ever put in before if I don’t want to be left behind.

I hear desperation there. Something wants us all to speed up and keep our noses down, so that we can’t take a breath and look around us. Something here needs us panicked so we can’t see clearly.

I have many many thoughts on this, and why it’s the case.

But the one I want to point at today is this:

Everything I might say has already been said.

This frees me up to stop re-stating it, over and over again — to take a breath, put down the phone, and start to feel which of these insights actually want me right now.

Carl Jung famously wrote,

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen or diet, learn theosophy by heart, or mechanically repeat mystic texts from the literature of the whole world – all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their souls.

People will endlessly read, watch, contribute to, and draw from The Glut, The Orgy, The Infinite Scroll — all because they don’t have the faith that if they stop and look inside, the same insights will already be there.

They lack faith in the simple truth: that the right insights are already inside them not as clever words, but as nourishing truths that want to metabolize themselves into their tissue.

It does little good, past a certain point, to keep reading and listening and watching the endless content our culture has produced and recited and repeated. Once you’ve seen all the basic ideas in a couple of formulations, you can pretty much just go inside yourself and start noticing which truths are trying to lay a claim on you. You can feel their charge and the discomfort of the distance between you and them. You can let that charge fill you up and guide you. You can let it break you down. You can let it build you up. You can let it hollow you out of all the complicated ego games, and fill you back up with coherence and potency.

---

There’s something enormously freeing, looking back at the endless repeating thought loops of our culture for the past several centuries. There’s even something soothing in seeing them blended into an algorithmic slurry and served back up in strangely neutered and confused forms.

It’s freeing to become aware of those endless loops — the ways they haven’t ever gone anywhere, and aren’t likely to start now. Not when they continue to be words and ideas.

We don’t have to put in so much effort.

All this trying, all these attempts to get validation and resources by repeating the right thought loop in a new, fresh way.

Here we are. This is where it’s gotten us. Ten thousand thousand blogs, and electronic critters who can produce more content than all of them combined.

Everyone who told us that technology will free us to be relaxed and happy, now screeching at us to go faster, work harder, build build build before we’re left behind.

Now seems like as good a time as any to take a deep breath.

Put down the phone.

Put down the books.

Put down the podcasts and the teachers and the clever inner work systems and modalities and essays and workshops.

And just listen.

Let the millennia-long thought loops quiet down, fade into the background.

And notice, silently, in the aloneness, that there’s an unlocked door, somewhere in front of you.

Something is waiting inside you. Something that doesn’t want to be turned into content, that doesn’t want to become a tool you can use to pry validation from the void.

It just wants to sit with you, somewhere deep inside your chest.

It just wants to nourish every cell of you. To shape you into the person you thought you’d find between the pages of a book, or at the bottom of the infinite scroll.

The person who’s already latent in everything you do, everything you are — all you have to do is quiet down for awhile.

---

Yes, I’m talking to you, you flesh and blood person in front of the screen.

But I’m also talking to you, you living breathing Culture behind these many flesh and blood eyes.

You can be everything you’d hoped to be, before you became this frantic, hungry, wounded machine. You have it in you to be such a gorgeous, noble critter.

All you have to do is quiet down for awhile.

Come sit with me. We can be quiet together. It doesn’t have to hurt so much.

1. I’m remembering Mary Midgley said she was often asked why she waited until so late in life to start writing her philosophy books. Her reply was that she needed time to figure out what she thought. Love that woman, god rest her soul.