Then there are those decades when everything happens. When everything is revealed. Who we are and what we can do. Our sins, our self-deceptions, our goodness. The fluxes of life, after a long time of bubbling ahead in parallel, suddenly converge, reach their maximum pressure point together, and erupt into what in retrospect seems like the obvious outcome. The future.

Few decades were as interesting – in the cheating, conquering, inventing, future-making sense – as the years 1905-1915 in America. When a few weeks ago I had the good luck of hosting an Interintellect salon of EL Doctorow’s novel Ragtime, a favorite reading of my teens, I got sucked back into that chaotic, creative time – a world in the making – that America entering the 20th century was.

The first time I read Ragtime, sprawled on the carpet of my childhood room, I had never been to America, let alone New York, where I now live and where most of this story takes place. I had enjoyed another one of Doctorow’s books, World’s Fair, the story of the author’s own youthful shenanigans among his relatives and other Jewish immigrants in the ‘30s, and so when I opened Ragtime I expected the same cautious, adult nostalgia. Instead, I was ambushed by something very different; an urgent, personal, intellectually exhilarating call – a nationwide provocation!

As its title promises, Ragtime is a ramshackle sideshow, a vaudeville magician’s trick, an often indecent conjuring of the elemental forces of mixing, inventing, exploding, and building, as it blasts through the first decade of modern America when this great country was busy doing just that. Electrifying America — oh, yes. It is no wonder even the less good film adaptation was such a success, and the well-made musical continues to sell out on Broadway to this day.

Spanning out – progressively bicoastally – in beautiful, concise, and inventive prose – a text as intricate and fractal as the lace of Evelyn Nesbitt’s contour when the Jewish artist draws her – Ragtime now made me pause several times just to stare at delicious sentences, photograph sections, go back and reread entire paragraphs. After finishing the novel, I re-read it once again. You know it is good writing when it makes you as insatiable as the era it describes.

Contemporary critics were baffled by what’s best about Ragtime: the book’s unique, rhythmic blending of fact and fiction. Being a tour of that tumultuous decade, we are invited to follow a variety of different plot lines (although not so much to choose our own adventure). Some real people from the crème de la crème of American society pop up and behave as they did in 1906. Admiral Peary or Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish cross our screens and do just what is expected of them. Then there are Doctorow’s entirely fictional creations, archetypes of the time. So much so, many don’t even have names: notably, we are guided through much of the story by the watchful eyes of a character named “the little boy”. (Who is he? Every little boy in America? Every little boy anywhere?) But most of the figures that populate Ragtime are hybrids of these two extremes: personae rooted in and then uprooted from history. The tension here is not just narrative and linguistic, but also epistemic. Is what I am reading true? And does it matter?

In the 1900s, we are at the Dawn of Celebrity: the cities, the newspapers, the dancehalls, the wireless are abuzz. So who could be more elemental, more archetypal in this era than the famous people and what we imagine they’re up to? The book’s fictitious and non-fictitious, just like ragtime tunes, seek to both revolt and entertain. No one in Tocqueville’s America can be content with their lot. It is unimaginable to imagine a satisfied American. The late-Victorian Father goes on expeditions of boredom; the tropics and the poles beckon him vacantly. The justly indignant, self-made Black pianist demands to drive the same Model T as the crowd favorite Jewish immigrant Houdini. They seek out challenges and let challenges find them. The narration jumps from one rebellion to another often within a paragraph even when the characters don’t actually bump into each other – although they often do. Houdini’s Model T literally crashes into Father’s suburban fences!

No one’s life story is solitary here, no one remains untouched. This is a time when Stanford White builds seaside mansions fit for entertaining a thousand people. When harbors are extended because the ships keep coming and coming in. A time when mass products are just never enough, and industrialists must rethink manufacturing structurally. The theaters are full, the summer frocks are wet, and the pages of Ragtime emulate, in their density, the undulating multitudes of this era. We are warned early on that the crashes and the crushes – of cars, of people into each other, of the waves of the sea – are a danger to the old. Something new is being born here, and with it a nation is afoot: dancing, killing, kissing, fleeing. So many new people – new kinds or new-coming – and the chips they’re playing just have not yet fallen. Anything can happen. And it does.

Within this cacophony, like in a great symphony, more intimate motifs also start playing. We zoom in closer on houses, on faces. On sleepless nights. On misunderstandings that cannot in the current language be cleared up. On revolutions that break out in defense of dignity. In Manhattan’s stinking tenements the people of the shtetls live in shoeless misery. Young men in affluent suburbs roam aimlessly in boaters and belle époque ennui. They dream of a sexuality not yet invented. On the beaches, big white hotels packed with nouveau riche immigrants of broken English compete who can hang up more US flags on their champagne-ed verandahs. The specters of Europe, of Egypt – the Origin – loom vaguely as an old dream to plunder.

Frustration, discontent, a running from decay can generate new worlds. In Ragtime, for a long time, nobody is happy. As a result, everybody is innovating. Younger Brother moves on from Fourth of July fireworks to developing military weapons. The Black couple decides to live as equals in society with such firmness that their environment considers acquiescing. Tateh, the Jew, looks down at his hungry child, and decides maybe it’s time to try this capitalism thing after all. To try and find himself and his family a useful place in all this swirl — there must, there must be a place for them too. For anyone. And at an important moment, the Irish maid sits down and lights a cigarette for herself in the living room.

The Old World now is just that, a source. A place where time has stopped — and so America is taking over. I meditate on how, whilst the memory of Ragtime having been a great read had stayed with me since my teens, the only scene I remembered vividly, verbatim, was when Freud and his disciples visit New York City. In his signature syntactic and cinematic playfulness, Doctorow shows us the aging Viennese and his pipe in a taxi as he is driven around a Manhattan he loathes: the noise, the crowds… The advertising! Freud cannot wait to make it back to his cozy study in Austria. But alas, it is too late, warns the author. America has already taken what it wanted from Freud; the doctor can leave as fast as he pleases, he has already changed private life in America.

Thus the coils of this narrative loop into one another on collision courses like in one of Younger Brother’s explosives. Paths are not crossed here, rather stuffed to the brim full of people; a myriad of dramas in a myriad of heads. I greatly love books like this; they feel just like real life. Where everyone must stay true to oneself and yet everyone can have a deep effect on whomever they encounter. The heart of the human social mystery.

And so just like at 15, I was again thrilled by this story, the language, the morals, the characters. By the humility of an excellent author of personalities – omniscient, to some degree, yes, but he knows well every human is a black box. Even when we hear their internal reasoning, the behavior is surprising to us – and to them. Even when we know their external determinism — their circumstances, norms, and stressors — we might soon observe them triumphing against the tide.

In a way that is very hard to do, Ragtime is a great book about men and women. Because of all the revolts that bring about the 20th century in America, it is the women’s that is the greatest.

The women of Ragtime emerge from the primordial mass of archetypes too, the Excel sheet of storybook canon, and yet they break free of these archetypes, they transcend them. There is the Mother, the Revolutionary, and the Whore. Of course: the American triumfeminate. While the men are busy taking hostages, inventing the assembly line, playing music, and sometimes shooting each other, the women will cross class, geographical, and racial boundaries and alchemize the social future of America.

The Revolutionary is of course Emma Goldman, the workers’ agitator — a woman who is both a total novelty at the time and already a gigantic cliché. In the decade when being a Marxist actually seemed to make sense (your kid had to work in a factory 15 hours a day and probably lost a leg or two when he got a bit drowsy toward the evening), her speeches helped America’s quasi-proletariat keep their wits about them. It is an ironic twist of history that the rights and prosperity Goldman so encouraged her acolytes to aim for were — and are — a product instead of capitalism, as Tateh, in his darkest and most self-honest hour, comes to admit to himself and thus change his life.

Goldman steps out of her archetype like a used petticoat when we learn she is in fact a gentle socialite, a polyamorous nurse, a kind of hippy. It is not through her vehemence and notoriety but her tenderness and connections that Goldman ends up influencing the other two heroines, directly or indirectly; her ideas of female intellectual freedom, economic independence, sexual expression, and contraceptive planning enlighten and liberate an entire generation.

The Whore is the in/famous Evelyn Nesbitt, the first American starlet. The Celeb. The girlfriend of famous men. She is photographed, painted, whipped by a pervert, and in general paid good money for (although never what she is worth, Emma Goldman warns her, just what the men find not too much to give!). The real Evelyn Nesbitt, the beautiful, paintable choirgirl, lived into her 80s, and indeed was a far more proactive and creative person than her demimonde beginnings would suggest. Her inventiveness is evoked in Ragtime: after her husband and tormentor Harry Kendall Thaw (a railroad heir) shoots her old lover and mentor Stanford White (the architect) and she nails the planned courthouse testimony so he can be judged insane, the young courtesan has some kind of epiphany and decides that if she can’t help herself at least she should help another girl. Thus begins her unspoken friendship with Tateh, the artist of the tenements, in whose daughter Evelyn finds her altruistic cause. This being America, the moralist Tateh, who previously banished his own wife for “prostitution” after the starving woman was assaulted by her employer, now has to accept the charity of the country’s most famous harlot. Just one of the things he has to learn to live with... And from her end, Evelyn’s donations help the broken man develop what would in a few years become the motion picture industry of California. But we’ll get there.

The greatest rebel in Ragtime is of course Mother. This nameless everywoman, this respectable housewife, is the first to learn, in the dark hypocrisies of her middle-class marriage bed, that some things are just no longer working in America. She is the one who sees through it — she doesn’t even immediately know what. She changes the wallpaper. She talks back at her husband. She literally invites change, in the form of a Black baby, into her home. She scoffs at self-delusion. She insists, eventually breaking down everybody’s resistance, on doing what is right. She starts out with the most clearly outlined cage; the wide hat blocking her view, the front porch’s delineation, the corset. And she liberates herself and her family, in a collaboration between her character and our history, until all 19th century pretenses are gone, and it is just love, and truth, and open spaces that remain.

Ragtime is a romance of innovation, and through the mythical figure of Mother we come to learn the greatest innovation of America is love. We’re deep in the Tocquevillian territory of free association, and Mother associates freely alright. The love for the different, the strange, the new, the other, the lovable ripple through this text with acceptance and certitude. Be that the Black child Mother shelters in her home and thus catalyses the destinies of a whole group of people. Or the couple she will end up forming with the now wealthy filmmaker Tateh, the epitome of the entrepreneurial Jew, a parvenu. When in the end Mother drives her Model T away into the Western sunset – California-bound, no less – she has become the steward of a hopeful and mixed family ready for all that will be new in the 20th century.

All innovation is first and foremost self-reinvention, and so Ragtime is also a story of the stories we tell ourselves. We start with Houdini’s shabby roadside wizardry, and the freak show the children sneak away to see in Atlantic City – and we wind up in Hollywood, in a new industry tasked with helping an eager, growing new culture define and understand itself through spectacle and awe, a celebration of community and shared experience.

JP Morgan might sail to the pyramids and bring home ancient treasures for his marble library. But while the rich are busy thus entombing themselves in the past, the masses have invented a new religion. It is loud, for sure, has questionable manners, speaks in a strange accent, is obsessed with money, always seeks to make new friends, and it is very, very American.

***

There is a book on the bookshelf, for years and years, and one’s hand somehow never stops on it, it is never re-opened. Then something shifts – in one of the many Doctorowesque plot lines of real life – and you think: I should re-read Ragtime. Now. It has to be now.

I often wonder how this happens. Do we have a “book instinct”? A kind of bibliomancy where the choice of the book is already the prophecy? I’d never thought of revisiting Mother, Coalhouse Walker Jr., Emma, Henry Ford, and the little boy until early 2026 when it was suddenly the obvious pick somehow. I believe it is because this current period too, like the 1905-1915 decade, is a time when all events accelerate. America is changing. The world is changing. People are often confused. People are often wrong. Everybody’s looking for answers to questions we haven’t even yet come up with. There is a new humility brewing, perhaps. One where one might say: I don’t know, but I will try.

2025 was a particularly hard and disorienting year for many people I know – thoughtful and competent folks, not normally prone to being so unsure. I took it seriously. It was in the air everywhere. I felt it too – the motivation for innovation, but also a fear of decay. Today I think it was because 2025 was somehow the last year of the old times. The clocks in America are resetting. A new culture is forming, innovating, breaking through. A new energy. A new love. New Americans, looking for stories through which to reflect on themselves. Nobody knows anything, but we will try.

And so Ragtime feels urgent again, overwhelming and clarifying. A book about abundant futures and free association. For the decades when everything happens.

Some years ago, when I was living in Brussels, my old Budapest friend Orsi and I took up the good habit of taking the weekend off, driving over to the Flemish side of the country, and staying at a spa. If you harbor prejudices about some parts of Northern Europe as a bunch of elderly people running around in the snow in a state of nature and then roasting themselves in overheated saunas, these are absolutely warranted. This is exactly what happens in these spas — in fact your clothes are confiscated at the reception lest you make other people in there feel “uncomfortable” by having clothes on you (social democracy). And yes, at the entrance stands a bronze statue of a naked woman on a bicycle. Eat your heart out, Godiva!

After a few timid trips to this establishment, which really did bring our old friendship with Orsi to a new level, I developed a theory I was determined to test empirically: that this spa might be the perfect place for a woman to go to by herself for the purposes of relaxation and reading, because there is no way anyone would come and bother you in that already pretty social-distance demanding situation that is nudism. And I was right. Thus began my short-lived career as nudist-spa patron, where I would read heavy books, write heartfelt essays, not speak to anyone for days, and sleep like a baby. Or I would have, if it hadn’t been for … Americans. And so it came to pass that one day there was an American at the spa, in the middle of nowhere in Flanders, who somehow saw this woman by the steam room, butt-naked and reading The Assyrian Army vol. III — having paid a small fortune and taken multiple trains to get there — and for some mysterious and culturally very inappropriate reason thought to himself, “I’m going to go and talk to her.”

I looked up at this guy over my book, who was so happy to find somebody “reading in English”, and I thought to myself: You gotta be — fucking — kidding me. Can’t a woman these days frolic around in a public space without any clothes on and be left alone?!

These people … They really will talk to anyone.

*

I was going to write this piece right after “Grieving in America”, that little coda to some of last year’s great losses in my life. How America, unlike the many places around Europe that I have lived in, has a stranger culture — as I will argue, for good reasons — and how that is both what’s great and hard about living here.

Then, as usual, my travel schedule shook up my philosophy schedule — why else we travel anyway? — and so this piece now must come after “American Catalysis” where I ended up writing about mentors, friends, and muses; in short, some of the most important people in my life who shake up more than just my travel or philosophy schedule.

In the “Catalysis” piece, I wonder aloud what makes people not strangers. In a world so open, so chaotic, so rootless as America or the internet is, how do some people still find themselves related, often in surprising, hard to describe configurations that become definitive for how their lives turn out.

In this current piece, I want to look at the other, open end of this, that unusual receptiveness which is a characteristic of American culture, and which — in a nice Hegelian way — in fact enables its own opposite, the relatedness between complete strangers to come to exist. It is not by accident that in Before Sunrise one half of the couple is American. That night-long conversation and then eventual marriage would never have happened between two Europeans, no matter how cute or smart or interesting that boy or girl on the train was.

They would have just stayed like this:

📖 “STRANGER CULTURE”:

Behavior norms and social rewards encouraging and governing the engagement with new people for short-term or long-term cooperation.

A few years ago in The Atlantic, dear Olga Khazan argued that the reason why Americans smile so much — really no other culture places such an emphasis on public smiling, let alone the economic signaling of perfect white teeth in that smile! — is due to historical reasons. Long before American armies and pop culture would take over the world, the country — whatever some politicians today might be saying — was an unusually multicultural place, comparable really only to places like Ancient Rome, Greek Alexandria, or some wharfs around Empire-era London. As a result, in America, people from very different corners of the world would habitually find themselves having to trade or collaborate with each other somehow.

Their encounters, as we can imagine, were roughly as “monolingual” as when an expedition comes across a remote tribe in the rainforest: if neither party spoke any English yet or not well enough, the people involved had no language in common at all.

So how could one proceed? Well, by using any other means of communication: hand gestures, surely, pointing at things … but mostly the face. Lucky for us, the human face evolved for communication: our hairless, childlike homo sapiens countenance can show a million different emotions and intentions — our ape eyes are no longer black buttons but evolved a white sclera to emphasize the direction of our gaze, our stretchable cheeks and mouths can express a greater variety of feeling than even our words. We scan each other constantly for clues — we read some emotions in the eyes (dishonesty, desire, shame), while some others around the mouth (delight, contempt, sadness) without even noticing that we are doing it. Nothing alters the face more than a smile: it unites all parts, all muscles, the entire bone structure. When lost for words, the Babel-like American past had a toolkit to reach for.

In time, the open glance, reassuring nods, and inviting smiles — even a louder, more open accent — became cornerstones of stranger culture, the American way of being able to befriend strangers.

Enthusiastic, open-mouthed smiles would have come across as overly intimate or even idiotic to Europeans (until they fell head over heels for it, of course). In America they signal trust, health, and optimism. (“I am at home in the world.”) What American faces want to be, first and foremost is: inviting. Khazan recounts how, when McDonald’s first arrived in Russia, they had to teach the young people working there how to smile and make eye contact. These activities were not previously part of the cultural repertoire.

Many of my European friends would never come to America mostly because they don’t like Americans, seeing them as flighty and flaky. For them “See you sometime!” is a constant letdown: they really think they will see you at some specific time soon. I have never shared these worries which is probably at least partly responsible for how I ended up living here. In fact I love, in the most generalized sense, how Americans behave and how you build relationships here.

I have lived in five European countries in my life — four of those in Western Europe — and I like to tell my American friends that in none of those countries would I have ever so readily been invited to, say, a Thanksgiving dinner, like I was several times in the USA before even moving here, often by semi-strangers, often to events that included their families too. A formative European experience of mine was Christmas Eve 2018, when my two Hungarian housemates in London — sisters — were having Christmas dinner downstairs with their mother and aunt, and to my surprise I had to stay in my room alone all night (they counted the king prawns price per person, and instead of asking me to chip in £20, I got banished). Those of you who know me and my work are aware that I have pretty strong social competency and so these things didn’t happen because of some awkwardness from my side. This is just how it is in Europe.

When people tell me about American loneliness, they might be less aware of what’s really going on across the Atlantic which, in my 36 years of experience there, is way more pent-up, clique-y, and distrustful in nearly every imaginable scenario than social life in America. Don’t be fooled by the little groups around the café tables you see on your holiday in Paris: the amount of value — social, intellectual, economic — that is “left on the table” in Europe because free mingling is so culturally prohibited is hard to even conceptualize. Social violence in this sense really is economic violence; the artery blockage no one asked for. (We say “free flow” of people, goods, and information for a reason: our entire civilization developed around the great rivers — the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Tiber, the Danube, the Rhine, the Seine, the Thames — with populations moving up and down them with their spouses and wares. What happened?)

Americans, on the other hand, love to mingle (so much so that they invented the sitcom for when you can’t). My personal preference for the American way may be my legacy from Jewish culture where, regardless of which country your strand of the diaspora happens to fall in, association with other people is pretty much “on steroids” at all times, and where a large part of life is devoted to managing relatively new and very generative connections. In Jewish culture, where we place such a big emphasis on family and firm — a compensation? — in fact one’s home is just a small starting point for ever-expanding social exploration. A fun conversation to have with Indian-American friends is diving into the similarities — talk about another culture that is inviting — and why these two ethnic groups have done so disproportionately well in America. There’s a reason why we use the Yiddish word “to schmooze” in American English for a very specific type of activity — you know what I’m talking about — but we could just as easily use “adda”, borrowing from Hindi.

Having more people from more places around who all have similar sensibilities is the American superpower. I rarely hear citizens of other “new countries” (as we Europeans still like to call you) like Canada, Australia, or New Zealand talk about just how flexible and open-hearted their compatriots are. Quite the opposite! The deep similarities between Indians and Americans, on the other hand, and how Kiwis and Canadians might seem friendly but come nowhere near Americans in their extroversion and openness to experience, refutes the theory that this is just about levels of historical immigration.

Naturally, it was about America that the hypothesis of “weak ties” was first proposed in network theory. For people familiar with scientific and economic history, all of this sounds logical: the moment when Londoners switched from bad beer to good coffee, they suddenly decided to turn their social gatherings into a place for trade speculation and inventing stuff they could then sell at scale. This did not only greatly raise the immediate value of information — as opposed to seeing it as just an annoying source of doubt about religious or social doctrine — but demanded that systems be built for managing the information being thus generated and amassed. The fact that not so very long after this people built the first incarnation of a computer is not shocking: the curiosity and the greed had always been there (in fact curiosity is a kind of greed itself) but now there also was the promise of immediate, socially differentiating rewards. And so people both started associating in a different kind of way and seeking to move to places where this was possible. The places that allowed for freer association became rich in a very non-zero sum way (compare the Spanish crown money and cathedral system to London’s harbors and stock exchange, and guess which one had more dough 200 years on).

There are ideal equilibriums where multiple different factors both motivate and enable people to cooperate at wide scales — including the presence of political liberties, protections, and institutions, an expected standard for congeniality and output, and both economic and social rewards within reach — that happen to be present in the USA, high levels of immigration and then immigrant behavior being just some of these.

The schmoozers, as always, win by a landslide. Political systems that are low trust and slow information lag behind. And so it seems that balanced combinations of the hypomanic edge and great and satisfiable ambitions are what’s adding up into this unprecedentedly open culture, where I, for the first time in my life, feel like I never have to explain myself to anyone for whatever life choice I have made, whatever I believe, or whomsoever I enter whatever kind of relationship with. This to me comes as such a huge psychological relief that it overwrites a lot of other stressors — administrative, emotional, financial — that are also very present here.

Before we go into these, let’s look at some models that can help us understand stranger culture in America:

The “weak ties” theorem

In America, Mark Granovetter’s 1973 paper that describes weak social ties within social networks is considered one of the most important sociology papers ever written. At the time, social network theory mainly focused on strong ties between family members, married couples, colleagues, and friends, and how these worked. When I talk about new intellectual “clans” developing their own information systems in ‘American Catalysis’, that is not far from that. (Interestingly Goethe, oft-mentioned in my essay, was one of the first people to formulate the strong ties idea in Elective Affinities, a novel where, in the secret backdoor labyrinth of their mansion, a husband once famously gets lost on his way to his mistress, and ends up by accident in his own wife’s room. Oops. Strong ties.)

To economists such as Adam Smith, novelists like Austen, Eliot, Dickens, or Tolstoy, and political visionaries like Tocqueville, the fact that weak ties run the world was always obvious. While families, schools, sports teams, colleagues, and old friends form strong ties with each other, the ties that connect these nodes to each other are so-called weak ties. Starting a new business, making a new friend, marrying into a new family, a way for neighbors to make well-informed political decisions together: the success of all these actions depends on how well-functioning our weak ties are. Through our weak ties, every single family, workplace, etc., in the country is connected to each other. (“Six degrees of separation” was coined by a Budapest writer, by the way. No one meddles like we do!)

Without weak ties and the information exchanged through them, families could not hang out together, workplaces could not learn from each other, friends couldn’t make friends with their friends’ friends — sure, in some cultures you’re supposed to marry your cousin and start a business with your uncle, but when it comes to not the stability, but the elasticity and evolution of a society, those archaic conditions are not competitive. When an American family invites a stranger like me for Thanksgiving, and is willing to become friends with me and consider then nurturing this friendship in the long-term, it is because of their openness to forming weak ties, which may or may not turn into strong ones later on.

And that takes us to —

High trust vs low trust countries

My friend, the Budapest journalist Adam Kiss theorizes that between 1919 and 1963 every family in Hungary was destroyed. Whether it was the communists, or the fascists, or the communists again — and you wonder why we smile less! — someone at some point walked into your house and took you or your stuff or you and your stuff. When today Hungarians look around their own homes or at their children, and remember the family lore or the countless things that grandparents never talked about, the feeling in their hearts is not certainty or confidence.

During university, I once worked at an NGO that campaigned to encourage LGBTQI Hungarians to answer truthfully during the upcoming anonymous census. We argued, possibly living in a dreamworld, that representation would be more vigorous if the government had a clearer picture of just how many people in the country identify as what. LGBTQI community members knew better: they didn’t trust either the government or their method, and in the end most of them refused to answer this question on the form.

In the mid-’90s, when I was around twelve years old, I visited the wealthy Vienna home of my uncle, a talented tradesman who managed to get past the Iron Curtain before I was born, back when few others could. One morning, standing on a corner in their prim Austrian suburb, I saw to my great puzzlement that you could get the daily newspaper out of a pile and then place a coin into a jar after. I was bewildered. I asked my aunt: HOW was this possible?! Won’t the people just steal the newspaper?! Steal the jar of money?! And my aunt, a former top model with an economics degree who understands value very well, explained to me that Austria was both a rich country (no one wants a couple of coins) and one with high levels of trust between neighbors. No one will steal the paper and deprive each other — not to mention that if anyone started stealing, the news company would just remove the pile, and then everybody would have to travel to the newsstand much further away instead of getting the paper on their street corner.

When I moved to London and saw how some public utilities were not vandalized, I took note similarly: other than in some “broken windows” parts of town, people usually don’t want to deprive themselves of goods, and so they also don’t deprive each other that much.

When we model the types of cooperation that will happen in a society, we differentiate between low and high trust cultures. All societies have some areas that will be high trust. When we say “high trust society” what we mean is that in some exceptionally fortunate places, there is wide-scale trust even between people who don’t know much about each other.

Consider various levels and combinations:

Family

A low trust society might prompt individuals to stay congregated with those they are biologically related to. The old “dynastic marriage” effect is real, and people even in more violent living conditions will be less willing to hurt direct relations, the father of your grandchild, etc., as they would also inconvenience themselves. In certain countries, some people still think — despite historical evidence, a library of Shakespeare tragedies, and some famous Coppola movies — that “in business, you can only trust family”.

However stable family life might feel in these entangled old-fashioned kinship setups, they will always come with a high level of distrust toward outsiders, and thus prevent a strong stranger culture from developing. In some other places, stranger culture might be less visible, but you will notice a strong “guest culture” — is the guest God? — and in such places you can be sure there is a great interest in outsiders, partnerships, and trade, despite appearances.

Incentives

A tight-knit family that feels it is surrounded by enemies is a sign that society-wide trust is low. If families — or any other type of “node” — don’t have weak ties with each other, they will not feel like they’re on the same team, part of a bigger system together.

When you travel to Silicon Valley, for example, a place that can only really exist in America, you find startups that are existential rivals of each other. And yet they are so densely connected by weak ties — constantly hiring from, investing in, and merging with each other — that they form a very specific professional community. Every American startup feels they have a stake in how the entire future will look: these collaborative households all work on bringing about a technological utopia faster.

When you read tweets about how much support people in Silicon Valley give to entrants and colleagues, all the warm intros and the angel checks, that is because of this cohesion of vision. If somebody there is an infamous asshole, they’d better have a lot of FU money or else no one will want to work with them.

In a business venture where screwing over your partners will make you very rich and famous will make you less immediately cooperative than, say, in a war, where your platoon can only make it out of a certain part of the jungle or desert if you stick together. When people choose whether to collaborate, they look at the rewards and penalties for “defecting”: any cooperation will be higher trust if we feel that defection is not so easy and not so rewarding.

Emotions are great at bringing people together. In many life/death situations, you will grow to care for your peers deeply. In intellectually or artistically creative environments, where people undergo psychological exposure together, family-style bonds are also common.

People who were nurses, WAAFs, or emergency workers during major disasters or wars talk about how those periods brought together entire generations. Collective sentiments are world-changing, and the people who feel what you feel and risk what you risk will be people you will trust. In populist dictatorships, this collective sentiment is often manufactured (via threats, censors, enemy narrative, public celebrations). Interestingly, wide-scale trust rarely develops under oppression. More on this later.

High trust societies allow for free association and forming emotional connections with strangers, whether for short-term or long-term connection. A healthy stranger culture is a sign of a healthy society.

Religion

People talk about the “civic religion” of America: liberal democracy with its Washington DC temples and the adulating tourists waiting up the steps to enter and worship. I lived in France and, believe me, it can get worse: there is nothing like the symbiotic mania that most French people have for la République. The American Goddess of Liberty might be welcoming the poor huddled masses come rain or come shine, but I imagine few Americans have such hots for her as a Frenchman does for poor Marianne.

What makes the American civic religion so unique is that, unlike the French who technically swapped one god for another, American life can tolerate both Caesar and God; the devotion to the democratic ideal can coexist with a lot more actual religiosity than in Europe.

Christianity, still the dominant religion of America, has some very strong norms for stranger culture — in fact, consequential thinkers, most recently the historian Tom Holland, argue that many of our wide-scale cooperative, nonviolent, equitable norms descended directly from Christianity, a great break from the “eye for an eye”, brutal, ancient pagan world.

Christianity dictates a golden rule. Our scriptures and teachings place great emphasis on visitors and outsiders. The angels visiting Abraham or Jacob. The flight of Abraham, Lot, Jonah, Ruth, etc., and of course Moses, and their reintegration into a new place. The Good Samaritan, the Annunciation, Elizabeth. Mary giving birth while traveling. Not to mention all the people Jesus visits and all those who host him. There are visitations in ancient texts too, of course, in the Epic of Gilgamesh and Greek mythology, but they usually end with somebody getting raped.

The Bible, however, could be read in its entirety as a series of encounters between strangers who affect and collaborate with each other, become friends and save each other. “Angel” literally means messenger. “Evangelium” means good news. The strangers you talk to bring news, information. The Word travels.

“Guest culture” is huge in Christianity: “Jesus said to his disciples, ‘If anyone accepts you in his home, then he is also accepting me. And anyone who accepts me, also accepts my Father God, who sent me.” (Matthew 10:40. Compare with the Jewish mitzvah — commandment — of hachnasat orchim, “welcoming guests”.) Inventing email marketing, Saint Paul later develops exceptional weak ties between various Christian communities via his Epistles, and transcends the family-bound ethnic structures of Judaism forever. A global institution is built that is safer and more stable for everyone. At home in the world.

Specific Christian traditions are not the only reason why religion in America is such a powerful social glue. It looks like any religion that is being practiced will endow communities with higher levels of trust and satisfaction. Shared service attendance, the pleasures of music, and a general sense of moral reliability help strangers cooperate in stronger ways and feel like they have a kind of social insurance for hard times. (Ask your Mormon friend what happens when he has a leaky pipe or a sick child and needs help. People will show up.)

Group evolution theory argues that in early human history the tribes that were united by a shared belief system outcompeted their rival groups. The genes of the religious won and proliferated. Even if you’re a bigger atheist than Richard Dawkins himself, you and I are both descendants of countless generations of people who were very religious. And it is not just in the deep past. Even today, most major armed conflicts are religious, even civilizational. People are pretty touchy about these things, and few things feel as identity-threatening than someone forcing some faith on you or trying to take away your old one. And, since faith cannot be explained with rational reasoning, people can only rely on tradition and nobody questioning what they believe — arguments or ridicule will only be met with resistance to cooperation.

Religion that is left to flourish will yield a lot of social benefits: well-oiled strong ties, morally reliable weak ties, general good vibes. A condition to this, I believe, is that religions themselves develop weak ties with each other and with non-believers to avoid isolation, echo chambers, and fanaticization. It is good news that the current Pope and many other religious leaders are promoting this.

Democracy

We’re not going to try to summarize what democracy is and how it works in one paragraph. (Who do we think we are, ChatGPT?) Instead, we are going to note that in most analyses of high vs low trust societies (Fukuyama, et al.), the matter of self-governance is central.

Why is that? Well, as Tocqueville to his surprise discovered traveling around America in the early 1800s, people who are granted a lot of political, economic, and religious freedoms — people who are not oppressed or restricted— will somehow be able to trust more people in their society and at a wider scale.

If I get Tocqueville’s logic correctly, he argues that freedom gives people an ability to feel involved in all levels of the political structure — as opposed to feeling like my family / village / factory is on one side and the king / dictator / owner is on another and when they want something from me, I will be reluctant or only do it while internally resisting, cheating, or doing it badly on purpose. (Why Tocqueville also notes how autocracies bring their population into war more easily — by force — while democracies have to be very convincing. But once at war, democratic armies seem to be stronger and have higher morale, since the buy-in is real.) In Tocqueville’s description of democracy, we are all on one team, even if we disagree about politics — in fact we are on one team because we can all disagree about politics.

Feeling involved in all levels of the system makes people trust it more: now I can understand that the Vienna newspaper, while technically there for free for the taking, is there for me, and I will pay after taking one so it keeps coming each morning. In the Tocquevillian ideal of democratic equality, I see no qualitative difference — because there really is none — between the men and women running the country and myself, and so when I look at my home or my children it won’t even cross my mind that one of these leaders would ever come and take them from me. A citizen in a functional democracy looks at the student handing out the census form and knows he can trust her: her life in a democracy is not spent betraying her fellow citizens to gain the favors of some tyrant.

When today’s political agitators fantasize about popes and kings, they forget why we got rid of those forms of oppression and trust-killing in the first place.

Feminism, civil rights, social progress

You surely have noticed that open societies tend to be faster to [at least try to] adopt socially progressive norms. Universal suffrage, reproductive rights, desegregation, demilitarization, and so on appeared and spread at greater speeds in societies where free speech and technological-economic access to its results enabled people to communicate with and learn from each other better. Where political liberties such as freedom of assembly and free elections then enabled them to take whatever they have discussed and identified as a solution and turn it into action, policy.

We live under such fortunate conditions while elsewhere in the world ethnic groups are still kept in serf-like conditions, girls are denied schooling, sold for money, even mutilated; some parts of the population are not allowed to vote, and political speech and action provoke severe, often lethal punishments. There is no norm so abhorrent anywhere today that wasn’t at some point shared by many more societies, if not all. It took us a long time to get rid of them, and the places where they were successfully eradicated are today more open than the ones where they were not. A place where women can go to school and decide when to have children and by whom, where gay people can build a family, where religious or ethnic affiliation doesn’t bar anybody from partaking in elections, and where peacefully expressing opinions online or offline doesn’t entail punitive horrors will, quite understandably, be a higher trust society. And so high trust is like a virtuous circle: more trust creates more vigorous social negotiation, and the results of such negotiations create more trust.

High trust societies — like any high trust relationship, really — are also, always, more transparent. When, after joining the EU, Hungarian LGBTQI citizens became slightly more vocal about their rights and needs, many from the older generations were genuinely surprised: “Who knew that there were gay people in Hungary? Where are they coming from?” Some older people thought they somehow “became gay” overnight, because even that seemed more likely to them than the simple truth that for a long time so many of their fellow Hungarians had to live lives full of pain and risk in hiding.

The internet

The more time you spend on the internet, the more you will become an American. Internet users around the world constitute a virtual American diaspora. Their weak ties are hardcoded and unthinkably powerful.

The increasing openness and connectedness that the internet has brought about works in a weird way when it comes to social trust. From this angle, the internet seems to split social reality into two.

The wild thing about the internet is not just that it is by default open-borders and international, etc. etc. etc. — but that it behaves like a secondary country in every country. Even in America.

To people who don’t understand the dialectic, it will seem like there is an Offline America and an Online America, and that these two realms work differently and obey very different rules. The great politicization of the tech industry, which has been a staple of the second Trump Administration, could not fully close this perception delta. Like a static in an old phone line, the online world disturbs the information system that is liberal democracy. Yet without internet, we couldn’t call ourselves democrats: would we deprive the population of access to most of the information in the world?

So how to understand these contradictions? Let’s look at some of my favorite dichotomies here, and how they complicate low/high trust in society:

(1)

Having free access to the internet is in many ways a more immediate and important problem than even free speech.

While free speech is a core political right, access to the internet feels more like a human right. Not giving somebody access to the internet is like keeping somebody illiterate by force. It doesn’t just deprive you of social freedoms — it deprives you of your full humanity as an individual.

Those who want to take away your free access to the internet will use all sorts of comforting distortions to bypass your intellectual immune system: community “values”, children’s “mental health”, “necessary” regulation against Big Bad Company, “sacred” land inviolable by cables, employees shouldn’t get “distracted”, etc.

All of these are designed to make you feel dumb, guilty, or ashamed for demanding something that is your human right. Whichever pocket of the culture war you inhabit, please never forget this.

(2)

Having free access to the internet does not necessarily lead to a higher trust society.

For example, if you go online and find out just how incompetent your government is or how ill-conceived the opinions of other people are, that will not make you feel more relaxed about your new neighbors or the truck that just arrived to repair the pavement on the other side of the street.

That said — and despite the many dangers of misinformation — what the internet does do, and why so many people seek to limit, even dismantle it, is amplify the truth. Sometimes the truth is bad. Not knowing it is even worse.

(3)

What the internet does for trust is it enables you to find people to trust.

If you are lucky, and adequate online tools are at avail, a lot of these trustworthy people will turn out to live quite close to you. In some other cases — another form of potential luck — you will discover your “tribe” at some random faraway place or even scattered all over the world.

Platforms like my company Interintellect — a marketplace for hosting conversations about big ideas — demonstrate how, when they find their soulmate, a lot of people will in fact change jobs, move to a new place, intermarry, etc. Balaji Srinivasan talks about a “Network State”. I think there are also “state networks”: these — at first virtual — social structures behave like a high-trust country wherever the individuals happen to be physically located.

(4)

As I argued in my 2019 essay “We’re a Niche We Just Didn’t Know”, a piece that went viral and kickstarted Interintellect, in everyday life there is little use in differentiating between “online” and “offline” anymore. What happens on the internet shapes your IRL experience anyway, and what happens offline will end up online in some way.

A free press was intended to create a higher trust society: the powers that be were held accountable, the little guy vindicated. If you did something bad, everyone would know. If you were pretty or rich, everyone would want you. The internet does something far more ambiguous to society’s trust levels.

I have argued elsewhere that the Capitol Riots were a paradigm shift in American culture. They proved that the country had … shrunk. Before the internet came and enabled us all to feel so close to each other, America felt bigger. If you didn’t like it somewhere, you could pack up your things — your spouse and your wares — and move to a completely different part of the country, into a different version of the culture, a different geography, a different climate, a different time zone, even a different language. My late father used to say that is why America never had Europe-style revolutions: you didn’t have to keep looking at the people you didn’t like if you didn’t want to. You didn’t have to deal with everything that was going on everywhere on a daily basis. But this is no longer the case. You can’t just pack up your things and move across the continent and never deal with whatever or whoever you left behind ever again. In a dialectical way, the information expansion the internet has unblocked has made the world — and America — a smaller place.

Even if access to the internet is a human right, you can’t call yourself free, you can’t see your choices and associations as free, if you cannot leave.

When people talk about curation and taste being the art of the future, their intuitions are correct.

*

Without high trust in a society, there can’t exist a healthy stranger culture. Encounters with the Other will be seen as unnecessary, suspicious, undesirable, or even dangerous. One thing pagan Greek texts and the Bible both agree on is that strangers are information: they always bring news. New gossip. New ideas. New inventions. New challenges.

Societies that are open and trusting will be open to integrating new knowledge. But only on their own terms and willingly.

Low-context vs high-context cultures

Let us go back to your smile for a moment. As first proposed by Edward T. Hall in the late ‘50s, communication theory differentiates between low vs high-context cultures.

To use a simple example: a toddler who has spent every waking moment of his life in the company of his mother will only need to say something like “kha—!” and the mother will know that he means the little red toy car that fell off the shelf five hours ago in the other room. She has extremely high context, and rudimentary, fragmented, allusive communication will suffice.

Another example: when leaving the movie theater, your friend jokes that the actor has huge eyes and looks like a fish. Hours later, when paying for dinner, your friend makes a funny fish face, and you both burst out laughing. No one around you understands what just happened, but you two have context.

On the other end of this spectrum is a camping site in the middle of Kazakhstan, where a clever entrepreneur will make sure his tea station is clearly signaled, otherwise the hikers would not know what the little shack is and would not stop, thereby ruining his business. Such an establishment will likely feature a sign in English, some kind of illustration of a steaming tea cup and a thermos, and several arrows. Maybe — why not? — the logos of Visa and MasterCard. Come on in…

During the pandemic, we all saw new levels of low-context panic. The creative ways in which illustrated guides on walls were asking you to wear masks, wash your hands, and please don’t spit on each other were both alarming and hilarious. But even without murderous viruses, busy multiethnic hubs like Brussels or the cities of America will display instructions in two or more languages — in Belgium French and Dutch, in America English and Spanish. This is another example of low context: whoever wants you to do what the sign says can’t know in advance whether you speak the main language or not.

Low context culture is in many ways stranger culture. Facial expressions, gesticulation, an inviting conduct — these are fundamentals where context is not expected to be shared. A friend of mine once looked at a couple, our friends, across our lunch table, and quietly remarked to me how she was sure the couple was about to break up, because they were so polite to each other. She was right. Etiquette — from domestic to highest level political — is a language of the low context: whatever guest might join your barbecue, whatever delegation might attend your state dinner, there is a shared set of customs to make the experience hopefully enjoyable for everyone.

In some European cultures where, unlike in English, we have formal and informal words for “you”, people used to differentiate even within their homes between high context and low context spaces. In the age of the Hungarian gentry, for example, even a husband and a wife would address each other formally in the shared rooms of the home — the salon, the dining room, the ballroom — while more personal forms of address were only used in the private quarters. As my aristocratic godmother once so eloquently noted, du/tu were for “Fuck you” and “I want to fuck you”, for everything else you leave your gloves on and behave comme il faut.

The Herculean task of any low context culture is to bridge communication gaps and enable strong, deep, lasting relationships to develop. The higher the openness of a culture, the easier this will be. Being open to new people to whatever degree you see personally fit grows not just the number of potential short term or weak connections but also the number of potential long term or strong ones.

Low context and high context forms of social violence also diverge. High context is full of emotional abuse and linguistic attack: in a family, a marriage, between old collaborators the participants always know how to hurt each other the most efficiently, where the pain points are. It takes a blessed saint to always resist and not poke there, although mutual deterrence does work. In a low context culture, on the other hand, people will be seen as “types” and aggression will be played out on the group-level. Think sexism, racism, or hating a specific religion or sexual orientation.

The mores in low vs high context cultures also work differently. Low context cultures produce superficial social butterflies and chronic philanderers, low context being ideal for “getting away with it” and “never having to face it”. Who would hold you accountable…? In London, Tinder is the app for fooling around. Even when they want to, many people will simply never be able to see each other ever again, given the size and chaos of the city. In cozy Budapest, people get married on Tinder. It’s a small place, everyone knows each other, and there aren’t many things you can do that people won’t find out about in 48h at most.

In my “Catalysis” essay, I discussed the TV series Mad Men at some length as an important comedy of manners for understanding identity, creativity, and talent in America.

I mentioned how, when his protégé Peggy temporarily detaches herself from her mentor Don Draper, she tells him: Don’t be a stranger. And you can see that I’m using a still from another legendary scene from the series as the header image of this essay, and you’re surely guessing that is not just there for decoration. You are right. Don, the story’s protagonist, arguably a stand-in for the show’s writer Matthew Weiner, is one of the most perfect embodiments of stranger culture I have ever seen. Of course he works in advertising, this most American of artforms, the artform of the low context: you don’t have to know anything about what this foaming detergent was doing in the past, the whole point is that it is — NEW! — exclusive!! Look at this smiling housewife on the billboard and her shiny washing machine! You understand her, without any context. She’s at home, in the world. And so are you.

Weiner even said in an interview, when answering viewer questions about some professional subterfuge or marital infidelity undertaken by Draper: “He likes strangers.” Wiener doesn’t say: Don prefers strangers [to those he already knows], but I think that’s what he means. Obviously, preferring strangers to the people one is deeply connected to and loves is pathological: only engaging with new people ensures no one ever gets to know you, ever gets to see the real you, and that you never have to deal with whatever you’re trying to escape from. To new people it is so easy to lie, to act. People who only have superficial friendships have no friends. People who sleep around for “variety” really only sleep with the same person over and over again. They only see the beginning which is always low context and thus always the same — no wonder they burn out.

While it would be less exciting in a TV series, in a healthy stranger culture we always strive for building something for the future. An invitation is not a goodbye. We open toward new people because there is a potential for more, otherwise it will feel like running around in a circle, as opposed to including a new person in our circle.

Building relationships from encounters with strangers is easiest in a low context + high trust environment — a stranger culture.

“From scratch” cultures

Imagine you were born in Rome on April 21, 1995, in the Trastevere neighborhood.

Your parents are super happy — a new arrival, new life! Your dad is singing adorable cheesy songs, and your mom is being showered with flowers and gifts from friends and coworkers. Your grandmother finds your mom’s old baby rompers in an old closet for you…

As you start growing and learning about the world, you learn that you were born into a 3,000+ year old culture, into a beautiful, old city that is also the seat of the leader of an old world religion that determined your birth date to be “1995” to begin with. While you will hear a lot about city states, fleeing kings, dictators, world wars, political corruption, and an immigration crisis, your world appears complete and pleasing. The environment is welcoming — so much so that it is teeming with tourists — the language and the literature are beautiful, the art mindblowing, the food delicious, the ways in which your country contributes to industrial design and fashion commendable, and you will even be able to access a nearly functional social welfare system.

When people ask about innovation stasis in Europe, I always imagine this girl — now woman — in Rome, and how marginal her prospects can seem. Things being as old and OK-looking as they are, she will have very little incentive to try and disturb or subvert her system. She would certainly get no rewards for it (not unless she went extremely online). Unlike in other old cultures like India, everything around this young Italian is almost complete (“almost” either because unfinished or because beyond its zenith and decaying). And so she is not so interested in disruptive information, in mingling with that many new people or learning how to appear inviting to them. She is a character in a play already written. Maybe there will be small things to move an inch to the left or to the right, but she might not crave — in absence of encouraged ambition or dire necessity — all-transforming change.

Or if she does, she might end up moving to the USA.

Come to the USA where nothing works, and where, if you want something, you might as well build it for yourself. There is a great power to this instability: no wonder so many new religions, subcultures, artistic movements either developed here or came and found a home. In such a “Zero to One” country, you will need collaborators to accomplish mere basics, and you will trust the kindness of strangers. You will have to. When people move to Bordeaux or Oslo and lament how everybody has a handful of friends all their lives and they all met in kindergarten, making it impossible for outsiders to enter their circles, what they are noticing is a lack of need: the locals of Bordeaux or Oslo are just fine, they don’t need to bring new people into their lives. There is no need, no danger, no great reward to motivate you to learn the art of openness. Those who know and love practicing this art will feel claustrophobic and bored to tears, and they will move their wares somewhere else.

And so while I share the great concern about American loneliness, it should fill us with some hope that if you’re lonely in a stranger culture, there is at least a chance to start building the community you want from scratch. In America, people will show up, raise the barn with you, and maybe even stick around for you. Just as it is in Jewish culture, where no diaspora can ever truly take their social network for granted and so you continue to work on it day after day, it is part of the American ethos that if you want something to exist, you will likely need to do it yourself. As the Hungarians would say: hunger is the best cook. (In India, another old but still hungry culture, you sense a similar restlessness.)

In my “Catalysis” essay, I explored encounter, inspiration, and mentorship — and called mentorship one of these “from scratch” types of relationships, where a lot is at stake and emotions can run wild, but where stable and productive one-off structures can arise from how the participants choose to shape their relatedness. That kind of weighty flexibility — both up in the air and vitally basic — is greatly catalyzed by stranger culture. It requires transgressions not so possible in closed societies: long term correspondence between people who have never met, semi-strangers flying to another continent to hang out with each other, unattached men and women out in public spending time together, friendship between young and old who aren’t family, the wealthy and the destitute in conversation without any agenda other than learning. When I talked earlier about “value being left on the table” in societies that don’t permit such relationships, this is what I meant.

But from scratch relationships are also risky. One thing I find concerning is the question of —

Irresponsible people

An attitude that seems to naturally arise from the combination of (1) low context + (2) high trust + (3) high openness + (4) “from scratch mindset” that together adds up into stranger culture is irresponsibility.

In the culture that is America, a lot more people will want to get involved in your life and with a lot less information about you than any European would dare to venture. This is great for innovation, association, collaboration, and community building. But it is its own kind of grave danger when it comes to major life changes and commitments.

In Europe, too, people can say a lot of unfounded things about each other in very specific situations — an obvious such situation is seduction. As a young woman, a cavalcade of men told me I seemed “withdrawn”, “too extroverted”, “thoughtful”, “thoughtless”, a “prude”, a “clearly very liberated young woman”, “boring”, “crazy”, “talented”, a “dilettante”, “oversensitive”, and “heartless”, and many other rigorously researched and double-checked takes that hoped to impress a débutante with the depth of their insight. (If a young woman listens to all the nonsense men say about her to catch her attention, she will end up developing at least eight personalities, which is what actually happens to many of us.) The reason why Americans spend so much time on self-branding and self-categorizing — something that I still find myself quite terrible at — is because what would unfold only at a bad date in Europe is an integral part of everyday life in America. People constantly have opinions about each other based on very little data, and — oh — they will share it. The reason why people self-brand so vehemently here is because if you don’t classify yourself, someone else will do it for ya. This “telling you who you are” move is especially problematic when it is positive. Being positively misunderstood is its own kind of hell.

The irresponsibility of advice-giving in America is a complicated matter, because advice you do need, help you do need, friends who are interested in your trials and tribulations you do need. But in the great Human Comedy that is this great country, typecasting is real and low-information decision-making is encouraged. No wonder the self-help book industry was born here, no wonder the Twitter hot takes originated here. The ultimate form of low-information advisory is the advice column, the bullet point list, the productivity superstition. And so in America you are told that you can be anything, that you must move to San Francisco, that you should take amphetamines, that you should drop out of college, that you should take testosterone, that you should get a PhD, that you should inject nerve-poison into your face, that you should get a stable job at a FAANG company, that you should have three kids in your twenties, that you should stick a piece of metal up your cervix and leave it there forever, that you should buy ETH, and that you should try this unknown-origin Chinese weight loss tea that comes with a hazmat suit (look, one person gave it five stars before they died). Start a company! Make it a nonprofit! Try this cocaine! Raise venture capital! Relocate to Austin! Get a publicist! Take up student loan! Build a new city! Try polyamory (but just with me)! Sleep ten hours every night! Buy property! Get your knees replaced! Invest in lithium-ion batteries! Accept Jesus in your heart… Do what I do so I don’t feel so bad……… Hire me! Tattoo me! Marry me! You should write a book. — You should move to America. — If identity is a consumer good, it is good to remember that some decisions are not reversible, a problem at the heart of the trans debate.

America’s success is survivorship bias in the best sense: so many people here do so many dumb and irresponsible things that — thank you, statistics — some of them must work out. Enter the venture capitalist, the talent agent, the divorce lawyer.

And so in this great openness and information exchange, and my own great hunger for more, it has been my constant worry that people might have a tendency to be very irresponsible with other people’s lives, exerting conscious influence without asking too many questions or gathering enough data first. In Europe, people judge each other based on too much information. In America, you are judged by very little information. I think this is a logical byproduct of this country’s looking-ahead mentality. Background information, your past, is meaningless, it only matters insofar as it determines your “brand” which then will determine which future you can get. Like in screenwriting where the rule is that every scene must either move the plot forward or reveal character. You only need to show the audience so much of the character that will be enough for them to accept the character’s next move.

Much has been written about the “warm intro” as it is practiced in our industry. The warm intro that drives so much of American intellectualism and innovation — impossible in, e.g., England outside oldboy networks, and a different type of social flex in Budapest — is positive irresponsibility. People don’t warm intro their dearest cousins: they warm intro people they barely know to people they know a little bit better. Sending a “Please meet Anna, she’s working on something AMAZING” email is a rash decision and a formidable way to do business.

I love stranger culture but I think there is much more to people than their first impressions, their beginning. Europeans can get stuck, sure, but within those fixed structures many deep feelings can be cultivated. Maybe this is the social knowledge Europeans can bring to the great American mix: the skilled management of deepening, existing relationships — the engineering of the river system. Whether one ends up going to a deranged Nordic spa to reinvent a childhood friendship or not, we have seen in “Catalysis” how American life allows for the building of ad-hoc nonbiological collaborative clans that last. This potential for flexibility + loyalty is a public good.

Too much emphasis on beginnings is too much emphasis on what is unfair about the system, too. Consider how, for Americans who come from difficult or unprivileged backgrounds, being denied even a first impression can be a social disaster, an exclusion from the countrywide dynamism that is stranger culture. Stranger culture done well is an accepted invitation: at the start the context is scarce and the relations are archetypal. But do stick around for when the real human nuances, the idiosyncrasies and foibles, the complications that make us human reveal themselves: that is where people get really interesting.

I know there is a midway where the opening is active but where people don’t get flattened into bland 2D cutouts. I know because I have been there and I loved it. Friendship really is only possible in 3D.

A crucial life lesson in America is that with all the schmoozing going around, some people will — despite their best intentions — be irresponsible with your life. It is not a political statement but my takeaway has been that I am the only person who can truly be responsible for me. That I need to connect, yes, but also to curate. The recipient of the warm intro will be discerning, and decide for themselves whether Anna really is working on something “AMAZING”. Before you incorporate, start planning a wedding, or ink a two-foot dragon into the skin of your back, you will stop to consider why this person has given you this advice, and just how much context they really have.

And as Tocqueville and every VC knows, the best way to make somebody behave more responsibly toward your life is by giving them a stake in it, by connecting your lives together, whether with weak or strong ties.

*

Working on Interintellect, I am always surprised when two Americans who are well-known in the same field have never met each other before their Interintellect salon or festival appearance together. This is not something that would be conceivable in snug, intertwined Budapest. But even in London the professional community is small, everyone went to one of two universities, the number of people and configurations is low.

When my fellow Europeans see Americans as “flaky”, what they might not see is that Americans are socially busy, they’re actively in touch with far more people than Europeans tend to be, and they embark on real friendships with far less information. To this day, every once in a while I find myself mystified about whether this or that person on my internal list of “the twelve people in the world I care about” is or isn’t indifferent toward my person, and I know what I am reacting to is this numbers game being played. Big places have many people, and America is a very big place.

In the periods when I travel a lot and stay in a lot of Airbnbs around the US, I always arrive home with some fresh idea. Seeing how so many other people live is new information. What if I moved the kettle over there? What if I bought a salmon pink pillowcase? That cute little lamp… Encountering many people is another way of encountering many world models that people hold, many lifestyles they have chosen. The word I use a lot in America is indeed “discern”. Carving out your self from a far greater spread of fabric.

In the abundance of America, the great curators win. (As in “Catalysis”: connection + curation.) People who can discern. What is real. What is useful. Which person is for me. What advice is relevant. Who do I want to be and whom can I be. People who lose their heads will become strangers to themselves.

High variance experiences

Even if you have exceptional curatorial instincts, one part of life in America will continue to pose inevitable challenges: rejection.

We dealt with the biological and psychological effects of social rejection in “Catalysis” — being excluded or at least not being included, not being invited, causes great physical and mental stress to humans. This goes way back: homo sapiens evolved in groups and for groups. Feeling a part of it feels existential, a matter of survival. Yes, it will come into conflict with several other human desires, such as the one for spiritual autonomy (people don’t like to be converted to faiths against their will so much that they will start wars), individual differentiation (people don’t like to be mistaken for others or to feel replaceable), or free association (people like to choose their friends and lovers for themselves, and want to be individually chosen and loved).

Rejection and curation are therefore an epicenter of the human story, the eternal tradeoff between what is good for my community vs what is good for me. It runs from Cain and Abel to John Stuart Mill to George Eliot to Karl Marx to Milton Keynes to It’s a Wonderful Life to Casablanca to Miss Americana to whatever in the world made Ross and Rachel break up.

But rejection has a cultural impact too. Human history is the history of the rejected. Second sons rebel. The deplorables deplore. The marginalized social groups gather strength in the shadows and then rise up. Since I cannot prove a lover …. / I am determined to prove a villain. Every startup is a complaint. Every piece of writing is revenge.

Stranger culture — social ambition on steroids — is ripe with rejection. I noticed that I have a very specific form of depression that I only feel in America, and after years I have deciphered it to be simply … pain caused by rejection. In America, I am constantly rejected. I am, because I constantly try. There are things and places and people to try here, and so one does — one expands and goes on quests! Stranger culture is its own form of variable reward. There is a great variance of experiences here. Some are truly terrible. But when it is good it is really good. The good stuff really comes out of trial and error and so it will be much better than most things handed to you as obvious in more closed societies like Europe. The hypomanic edge is also edgy hypomania: the amplitude of social contact is off the charts.

Of course, there is social rejection in Europe too, but it works differently. In Europe, your arena of social exploration is quite small, and so in a cyclical way you frequent only a handful of people at a time. These people, to make it a little bit more interesting, will sometimes want you and sometimes not. Your rejection will come from the same place as does your being accepted. To me, this has always felt super pointless and tedious. Like recreating high school for adults.

In America, the rejection comes from new people you are trying to connect with. It either comes right away — then you can continue working on being accepted, and sometimes you eventually are. Or it can come after the initial “first date” stage, when somebody sniffs you out but then thinks you’re not a match, or when you’ve had your “one hit wonder” but now you don’t seem that promising anymore. In almost all such cases, you can make a comeback if you try hard.

Socially, Europe vs America is like playing one chess game vs simuls. In my experience, in the nice Tocquevillian way, once the choice (connection + curation) has been made, freely and from many options, these voluntary American or American-style relationships tend to be stronger than the ones one is born into in Europe.

And maybe it’s just me, but isn’t it more fun to have more chances?

A lot has been written about specific groups that feel rejected and therefore depressed in recent times. Peter Thiel famously spoke about why Millennials check out of capitalism. Peter Turchin identified the components of how counter-elites form in modern politics, blaming elite overproduction for the mating and labor market failures of the overproduced elites.

When we talk about vibecession, negative social contagion, and mental health crises, a useful approach is to think about them in terms of rejection. And to conceptualize rejection as a necessary albeit excruciating part of all free movement and free association, of stranger culture. I wonder whether how I have been teaching myself more resilience in a social world with so much freedom and choice to combat my rejection-fueled depressions could have a collective equivalent? Can social groups learn to accept the pain of failure as a normal part of trying and expanding? Are these, in fact, growing pains?

People love to claim that men are better at handling rejection, and base this on how — traditionally — men were supposed to have hit on many women at bars as a way to play for large numbers and put up with being turned down (or worse) until someone would agree to go home with them. But if you look at the types of social webs that women weave and then maintain, and how disproportionately job loss affects men’s mental wellbeing, you will realize this is a bit more complicated than that. I can’t see how groups could build resilience and enjoy freedom more without at least an inter-gender, but preferably also an intergenerational, exchange of ideas.

It is impossible to live in America and not know that freedom is very hard. Living in a social system that allows you to try again, though, makes it worthwhile. And if your future depends on whatever you are being typecast as by yourself or by others, you’d better fight for a role in the Human Comedy that allows you multiple attempts.

*

When we talk about superficial typecasting, we must take a moment, like we did in “Catalysis”, to talk about fame.

In many ways, fame is the ultimate stranger culture. A great number of people feel they know famous people. When people in America want to become famous, they want to become the “go-to guy” in a genre or field.

The part of stranger culture that is fame has a parasocial quality of course — people imagine they have a connection with famous people they’ve never met. But it is also true in the sense that running into celebrities is memorable. I am quite sure every single waiter who has ever served Quentin Tarantino and recognized him says they “met” him. I am pretty sure 20 years later Tarantino speaks much less about such an encounter than the lucky waiter does. (I hope Tarantino tipped generously!) And most celebrities have varied international schedules too, during which they end up meeting far more new people than most people do. When famous people burn out, they tend to become misanthropes. In fact I know very few older famous people who are not misanthropic to some degree.

All of this works in relative terms, of course. If you are the mayor of a small village then those 2,000 people in your jurisdiction will have this kind of imbalanced relationship with you (and your burnout will be caused by those 2,000 people).

In default stranger cultures like the USA, celebrities are a type of Schelling point between unrelated individuals. Whoever you are and whatever you believe in, you will probably have an opinion about the Kardashians, the Obamas, and some famous athlete I have never heard of. Celebrities in this sense are a bit like historical events or the government. I assume that in America, you can walk into any diner in the middle of nowhere and strike up a conversation about how lovely Dolly Parton is, how expensive everything is, and where everybody was on 9/11. The much written-about death of monoculture does not in fact diminish this effect at all: people, things, and events that are truly famous reach much wider audiences today than they ever have before.

In Europe, people want to become famous as a way to meet more people. I am a child of two generations of Budapest celebrities, and I can tell you that my parents — and I assume my film star grandfather too, although he died in 1968 and so I could never ask — knew way more people than anybody else I knew. For people who dislike silence and stasis, common elements of European life, building a public profile is an enticing possible way out.

In America, everything being downstream of connection + curation, people like to build their personal pantheons of which celebrities they personally like. On dates, “favorite this” or “favorite that” seem to be standard questions, a matter of identity. In the great openness that is fame culture within stranger culture, we want to form stubborn attachments even with our parasocial relationships. “Kanye is going through some things right now but I still love him.” “My team is going to win again someday.” It is not an accident that even mattress salesmen and injury lawyers pose as celebrities in commercials and on billboards here.

As I discussed in “Catalysis”, some parts of the tech world seem to be uniquely resistant to the temptations of fame. While there are some outrageous outsize characters out there of course, many of the truly powerful people in Silicon Valley you have never heard of. And yet the place is densely and proactively interconnected with millions and millions of weak ties. As a matter of fact, being too famous is seen as a complication in upholding these productive connections.

With my therapist — also from the Budapest “Jewish Mafia” — we often talk about my great desire for what Hungarians call the “szakma”. There is no good equivalent for this word in English, especially when used so metonymically. Szakma means trade, profession, a sector, an industry. And we use it also to denote the professional community of weak ties and friends. Respected by the szakma is what you want to be. Having grown up in show business, this specific feeling — of camaraderie and creation — has always been my expectation baseline, a kind of life goal (never money and never fame for me; always “do people want to work with me, do they want to be friends with me” — and I do think this is what everybody, really, wants).

To me, the American way of doing it feels very comfortable. In America, you don’t need to be either related or famous to have people know you, and to exercise your right to form newer and newer connections. Being only famous in the “szakma” is actually an excellent compromise where you can be a little bit of a Schelling point for others without too much of the public hassle. In many ways, Interintellect is a semi-public arena just like that, nestled between the brutal limelight of fame and the namelessness that feels to people like rejection. In the middle there is curated connection that lasts, as well as innovation and evolution; you can take responsibility for yourself. It’s in the middle where the really exciting things happen.

The stranger culture which catalyzes unprecedented levels of innovation in the intersection of America and the internet (Silicon Valley) but which also begets loneliness and injustice because not everybody, always, can build the basics for themselves, finds a balance in the middle.

Funnily, in America, where once again I spend so much of my time around very public people (how does this always happen to me?), what I have learned not through their advice but through their behavior is that in fact I love my privacy very much, and have little need for exposure beyond friends and “szakma”. This is what you get, I guess, when you send a Hegelian e-girl to America.

Life: changing

In 2012, I had to attend a series of European film festivals. I had written a couple of screenplays, and I was being selected into screenwriting labs with them, and shopping around trying to find a director. This was not so easy because in Europe the mostly male directors prefer to have at least co-written the screenplays, and I had no interest in directing a movie myself. And so I schmoozed and schmoozed a lot, in arctic Berlin and river-damp London, and pretentious, pointless Locarno, and for the first time started working with Americans more seriously.

I loved it. It was as if a giant weight that I had been carrying my whole life finally rolled off me. I could laugh loudly! I could say what I wanted! I could show interest and enthusiasm which are so important to me. I could sit down and walk away whenever I pleased. There were no mocking downcast eyes, no icy silences, no high school whispering about you in front of you. Americans looked at other people with an open face, and listened as you explained what you were working on. It was amazing! I was so happy that multiple times I nearly cried with disbelief and relief. In my heart I always knew it was possible, and now here it was. (You don’t have to hurt each other. You can, but you don’t have to.)

And at the festivals, my college years spent managing underground rock bands paid off big time: I knew all about how to end up at the wildest after party with the most shamelessly famous people, and how to leave unscathed…

Then I flew home. I was excited to use my new skills, my new freedom. One particularly warm night in August, I was hanging out with a friend in one of Budapest’s trademark ruin pubs, nursing our fröccs. It was late. As my friend and I were chatting into the night, I suddenly noticed that under the dark trees, at the next table about five feet away from me, a little group was sitting. I recognized them. A well-known Hungarian film director with whom I had just had a meeting about my script! He wanted to turn it into a Mad Men style TV show. A female film producer who had a reputation of being difficult, but whose team I’d had good experiences with and whom I had previously run into here and there. And a TV presenter looking to break into the film industry who had received my script, and we had been emailing about it that very morning and were scheduled to meet up soon.

It was clear to me that I couldn’t be sitting so close to these folks — all of them aware of and interacting with the Berlin Film Festival script lab selected historical movie that I had written, one of whom I hadn’t even met in person before — and not go over to say hi. But stronger than my sense of etiquette was just my simple happiness at the sight of possible future colleagues. And so I sat there and thought to myself: “I’m going to go and talk to them.”

I explained to you earlier in this essay how my social experiences have been very high variance because I expand and try a lot. That I have been actively looking for environments that enable, even reward this. That the price to pay for being able to start again is instability. Freedom comes with rejection. You open. You curate. You care. You win, or you lose. Then you try again.

I put down my fröccs, told my friend that I’d be back in a moment, and ducked under the dark trees. The other table immediately went quiet.

“Hi!”, I said.

Nothing.

Silence.

I froze. I, I … I explained how I was sitting just there, over there, hi, hi, and oh hi, and so great to meet XXX in person, does he want to talk …. a bit?

More silence. The female producer smirked. The famous director looked uncomfortable, he seemed to pity me for some unclear reason. The TV presenter stuttered something in a mocking tone that I couldn’t quite catch.

I just stood there in that tension and I didn’t get it. These people also went to the same film festivals, no? They must know how to not be like this. And why would complete strangers at those faraway film festivals be more friendly to me than the people of my own city? What makes my city so … small?

Eventually, the TV presenter somehow deigned to have a drink with me and talked to me for the ten minutes of our exchange like I was a mentally deficient five year old (which made me feel bad for any five year old he might speak to). I was shocked. I had lived in that city my whole life, for nearly 30 years, I hailed from a pretty prestigious and well-connected family with plenty of social capital and cosmopolitanism, and still they can do this to me. And why?

I never found out what I did wrong by walking to that table, literally three steps from my own. I had not read Girard yet. I have been humiliated — even violently attacked — a couple of times in my life but there was always some reason. This moment lives on in my memory as the most unnecessary slaughter.

After this, I started paying attention to silences in Europe. A week after my ill-fated ruin pub run-in, I attended a garden party in the home of my school friend Julianna. In her idyllic cottage on the outskirts of Budapest, many of our former Catholic school classmates gathered. I always assume that religious people will be kinder and I am always disappointed.

As we were eating at Julianna’s long rustic table, I got bored of the monotony of the conversation and made a joke. It wasn’t in any way political or sexual — I wouldn’t dare. Just some irony. Silence. People looked down. More silence. It went on. I looked at Julianna: WTF? She’s a clinical psychologist so I thought maybe she knows? (Later she explained to me some theory about how being insecure makes people mean. OK.)

The general sentiment of social life in Europe — Southern Europe’s cabals, France’s cutting sarcasm, England’s family tree paranoia, Eastern Europe’s hatred of being seen trying — is “I don’t know what I did.” You never know. They don’t tell you.

They don’t tell you because illegibility is the goal. They don’t want to identify, communicate, and then solve problems. While big open society America’s social rejection is a matter of numbers — in America and on the internet you need to try and find your people to love — European social circles are small. The only way to make the small, finite pool interesting is to accept and reject the same people for no reason on and off. Instead of finding variance in expansion, the law of diminishing returns applies. To my mind, it is inane, a waste of time. It blocks the free information flow, weakens social foundations. To me, it kills trust. To them, it feels like a sort of faux-freedom.

The way small children reject some foods because they feel powerless and the only thing they can say no to is what’s on their plates, if you’re forced to spend your life and career locked into a circle of 40 people, you will entertain yourself with always being socially violent to a random set of ten of them. In places where the work is hard and the walls are high — distance, cultural heterogeneity, atomized society — you will build with all your strength spaces and communities that are inviting. You will want to break down walls. In places where the work is easy, holidays are long, and everyone is thrown on top of each other anyway, the context is too high and so people will manufacture walls. In Europe, randomly rejecting people but not revealing the reason for their humiliation allows you to later “forgive” them or pretend you weren’t mean, and to reshuffle your love/hate matrix at will.

In America, “saving face” is equally important but seems to work differently. I am still learning this. I have had few open conflicts with Americans but in each case people came across as very “learned” about conflict resolution, this seems to be something that people are taught and that they practice. These discussions — except one notable case where I just told somebody to kindly fuck off (and I meant it) — always focused on problem solving and finding some compromise. Americans seem to always want to allow other people to “save face” so in the future there could be collaboration with them if necessary. I am new here, but this seems more rehabilitative, more about new chances. In Europe, everybody’s walking on broken bones all their lives. And you never know what you did — because you did nothing.

I left Budapest not long after this — though I first moved to London which has its own kind of little shop of interpersonal horrors. To this day, I don’t understand who exactly benefits from randomized exclusion, association-blocking, group shaming, and group sacrifice, as to me it’s clear these all stifle information flow, novelty, and change. They clearly make people more susceptible to autocratic overreaches too: if you have a society where small groups don’t form weak ties with each other and where within small groups people are basically building cages around themselves that they then can’t climb out of, what exactly will fortify this society’s members to resists attempts to polarize or oppress them? They have already polarized and oppressed themselves.

Spending decades observing the European way of deliberately cutting into one’s own social flesh, observing how everybody’s living in a kind of constant social pain that is just considered a “part of life”, made me more conscious of my own talents. By the end of 2012, I had started actively looking for ways to develop them. I started moving away from the film business, I started building organizations, relying on my own instincts for how to create openness that allows for deep connection. How to create psychological safety in variance that leads to real innovation, not just content. Stranger culture that allows for deep thinking and deep friendship.

As I was walking away from the dark table on that macabre night in Budapest, devastated and shaken like I had just survived the ice bucket challenge, I decided that I would never be in a situation like that ever again. And ever since I left Europe, I have never been.

*

Like all ambitious parents, I strive to give my creation — Interintellect — what I wish I had had. In my case, these are spaces where ideas are celebrated and where social violence is as nonexistent as possible. Peace of course has a cost: as a company, we can be smaller, slower, we need to build more deliberately. The result is that people can encounter invigorating novelty without too much pain caused by the variance. Such negotiations are at the center or all social building: every city wants to be both fun and safe somehow, and so does every friendship.

I want to go right into the middle, you know: where public and private overlap, where we are neither fearful nor bored. Where the dialectic that I just can’t seem to be able to shake off will hopefully blend with the local pioneering spirit and keep me going.

I am noticing changes in myself, my taste is changing. I never know if that’s good. When Olga Khazan first came on Interintellect, to an online salon that I was lucky enough to host, she talked about her book Me, But Better. In this book, Khazan recounts her decade-long journey of trying to change her own personality. To become more easy-going, more interested in people, more willing to take risks.

If she hadn’t been already living in America, I would have given her the very irresponsible advice of moving here.

In early 2019, around the time when Interintellect started, I took the Big Five personality test. Openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism - also called ”OCEAN”. It was very educational at the time. Now, preparing for Olga’s salon, I wanted to take it again, and see if in six years anything had changed.

Because in my life everything had changed since early 2019: my company, most of my social circle, my ambitions, my writing, travel, love affairs, America. And, to my surprise, it all showed up in my new Big Five results big time. Running Interintellect — hard! — and moving to America — harder! — have made me more extroverted and much less neurotic — I became “100/100 dutiful” (how embarrassing!) — and I even acquired some agreeable traits, quite the taboo for an Eastern European.

The only thing that remained constant was super high openness. Seems like that’s innate and nothing can change it — if you’re a bad fit somewhere, you will just have to spend 13 years trying to move to where you are a good one.

I will always be European and I know that Americans see me as a European. It is true: I am more likely to grow into an old lady on the Upper West Side who goes to the public library and then to the theater than a geriatric raver at Burning Man. After I came here I worried: what if I was too “weird” for Europe but not “weird” enough for America? What if I was too independent-minded for European capitals but not strong enough for America’s cities? What if I can’t schmooze that well…

These days, when I look at Interintellect and my writing, I see a supple but stubborn duality, my very European obsessions and my very American wanderlust. I see my version of decadence bringing respite to people trained to be always efficient. That my having learned the hard way to be honest in speech and steadfast in attachment speeds up people placing their trust in me.

I hope there is a place here for these contradictions, because they are all I have. I am at the stage of my life where one is learning clarity. Not the way I learned science as a student, or from the rationalist movement as a young woman, but seeking a kind of moral refinement. Now I know that it is hard but not impossible to get things right. That I am, in fact, only ambitious about a handful of things, and that it is probably OK to curate away everything else for now and to know the other doors aren’t forever closed either.

To start over again and again and again and again. To love and do what I will.

As people, what we want most is to live out our lives in each other’s consciousness. Imagining oneself as the tree falling but no one hearing is an unbearable thought to us. And what are visitors, if not another chance to encounter, to enter the plane of vision of an Other? To meet their gaze openly, and maybe respond with a smile.

Living in a society with hundreds of millions of strangers any one of whom could become your best friend at any point in time: it shouldn’t work out as well as it does. But it does.

“Egy középkormélyi theológ - gondolhatta, gondolom - (nem skolasztikus talán - ki üvegből fújja várát színtelenre - hanem kinek üveget fest lelke szennye - kinek minden régi szó egy régi kép - testi misztikus talány - mert az eszme hűs, átlátszó, tiszta, színtelen üveg - s csak a test a misztikus, vak, s szennye szín és bűne szép) - egy ily ős poéta-doktor: nagy palást, tanársüveg - bájos régi doktorom - gondolhatta, gondolom - úgy mint én diákkoromban…” Mihály Babits

“I dare you to get close enough to me that we both change.” Toby Shorin

During the first two weeks of October, I was working on a piece about strangers for this blog. I have a lot of thoughts about strangers. I think America has a “stranger culture” which I find quite unique and fascinating. More on this later.

Then mid-October I found myself in San Francisco and in a series of conversations with friends, who made me realize I first must write about people who to me feel like the opposite of strangers. The characters who inhabit my life and, through our adventures and attachments, actively shape it.

I am mystified by the opposite of strangers, and how one becomes one. Why is somebody not a stranger to me while another person forever remains one? How does that connection — that curation — work? How much free will and say do I have in the matter? Are the characters in my “plot” somehow preordained, pre-written, and I just have to meet them at some point? They were always there, just waiting…? Or are they innocent bystanders that I choose myself and then try to “convert” into a connection? How do I know if we are truly connected? … How does anybody know anything?

Maddening.

I also found out that two friends whose takes I value greatly are writing books, respectively, about mentors and muses. Uh oh, I thought. Uh oh! If even they don’t know, then we are truly screwed. Why else would anybody sit down and write a long-ass book if not because they too are so mystified and troubled by this that they have to spend hundreds of pages trying to figure out what is going on!

And so it seems like despite everybody’s best efforts, some of the most important relationships in life have remained mysterious. Because it is, still, a mystery indeed why certain people move and affect one another — while some others remain untouched. The media can eulogize the Human Relationship (R.I.P.) all they want, the moving and affecting are as strong as ever.

I generally don’t like writing about people who are important to me because what if they get offended, or too flattered, or run away?! So I decided to approach this question like it wasn’t really about me, as if I was just an observer. The Fool in the medieval court following the comings and goings of potentates from the foot of the throne. (Aren’t we all, anyway —)

My goal here is not to come up with some all-resolving formula; I just want to think through this stuff in public. I want to sit and watch the master builders and tradesmen, the poets and the priests, as they strut and fret, and tell you what I have seen. Most likely, it will signify nothing.

Mentors and muses are a great starting point for meditating on important relationships because these are both relationships that are complex and unfair, both timeless and also very loose and fickle in structure. When things are simultaneously important and confusing (see: people), our negotiations will be vigorous. These relationships must acknowledge their being relationships in the first place — as opposed to some kind of drive-by transaction — and then build themselves from the ground up, from first principles. Bildung.

As they are being built, we get to ask our questions.

Every question a person asks about society is, at the core: How do people work?

And every time we ask “How do people work?”, what we’re asking is: How do I work?

No one ever feels like they know enough about themselves — or, as it follows, about each other.

So let’s look at some less obvious ways in which people are not strangers to each other — and, thus, to themselves. There is nothing stranger in this life than the familiar.

*

Some languages, like French, use the same word, “stranger”, to mean “foreigner”. In English, too, we used to say — pre-science fiction — “alien”. It is preserved in bureaucratic language, for example, how my visa says I am an “exceptional alien” in America.

Exceptional or not, the foreigner is always an outsider. There is a lot of knowledge that comes with this outside perspective. Not all of it is comforting or complimentary.

When we talk about outsiders becoming entrants, we’re talking about an entrance into a society. New people can only enter new circles when they are invited. The best way to get invited is by a member of that circle whom the other members accept and respect. These are often seniors within the circle, some even in leadership positions. When a respected senior member introduces a newcomer, the newcomer’s entrance is seen as legitimate. We trust the judgment of senior people more because they have seen a lot.

When this entry is professional, a great person to be invited by is a mentor. Joseph Campbell — or George Lucas — will have you think that mentors materialize like some kind of interlude on a lonely Hero’s Journey; that they ride in having turned all white and shiny to help you when you think all is lost, and then are gone. This is not how mentors work in real life. While muses might respond to invocation indeed, in real life a mentor is an invitation.

In more ritualized spaces — from some workplaces to frat houses — these invitations follow specific rules. In the more self-arranged, “weirdo” worlds of tech, the arts, or big city subcultures, these rituals are harder to concretize, it’s often something entrants and mentors have to figure out individually, for themselves.

It is because of its undefined structure and how under-explored it is that there is something about mentorship that can be revealing about how all human relationships and communities — ethics — work. There is something crucial to be learned here on what matters, what we owe to each other… etc. Why such relationships can have such a seemingly outsize importance to people. Why succession crises feel like life/death. The ever-present anachronisms of social and sentimental life that we’re losing our words for.

Mentorship indeed can feel so high-stakes because it is tied to the complicated matter of social acceptance. We assume our physical and psychological selves evolved for a prehistoric society where the survival of individuals was a group task, and so social acceptance would determine whether you would — for real — live or die. Maybe “overreacting” matters of acceptance and rejection is not such an overreaction after all.

I think this is important, but doesn’t give us the full picture. The thing is that mentorship is shockingly under-discussed considering how life-changing its impact — both immediate and longterm — can be. This impact is in fact much closer in range and size to that of romantic commitments or child-bearing than to everyday level collegiality or adult friendships.

As with romantic attachments or fertility decisions made for one’s family, mentorship can change basically everything about your life: your life plans, your self-image, your career, your circle of friends, your financial situation, your marriage prospects, which country you live in. These are not trivial matters. And these great metamorphoses take place in these extremely under-regulated, low-orderliness spaces — Patrick Collison calls it “under-theorized”; I call it primordial intellectual chaos — where the boundaries are truly only defined by the sympathies and decency of the participants, their judgment and good care.

It is all the more interesting how, and you will read more about this in a later section, in a lot of modern-day cases people will only speak to their mentor once or a handful of times all their life. (Sometimes never directly!) If you have ever hopped on a mentorship call with a younger person who then seven months later phoned you out of the blue from a new city saying: “I did what you said; I quit my job!”, and you are absolutely sure you never said anything like that to her during that one meeting where you ever spoke to her, you will know what I am referring to.

I think the elemental, nuclear-power self-creativity that is activated in mentorships is both exciting and scary. No wonder I paired it with the Muses. No wonder society likes to pretend it … doesn’t exist.

So I will risk sounding like a Fool and say: it does exist.

On my own journey, I am exactly midway right now, just out of the forest. I am both a mentor myself now, and in some sense still being mentored by others. So I think I can report from the trenches in between. Maybe you will find it useful.

*

Despite a deluge of self-help books promising otherwise, to most people self-creation is a source of shame. When it comes to how smart we are or how great we look, we like to act like our success works like the dreams in the movie Inception: no one really wants to remember how it started. You want to seem like you were dropped into it in-medias-res. (Or, to be more accurate, in-social-medias-res.) Born this way, woke up like this…

This is why people alter the story of the formative years of their careers, or how they really made their first million, or how they really met their husbands — this is why people delete old photos from their online profiles.

Since mentors represent the beginning, they necessarily enter people’s lives at a time that people will later remember as embarrassing. The first thing good mentors show their mentees, therefore, is tact. Good mentors also tend to have a good sense of humor. Tact and humor help mitigate the fact that they have just walked knee-deep into someone else’s suffering (or at least self-doubt and dissatisfaction).

All human relationships are about information. We want to attach to and then exist in information systems, and are drawn to people who we feel have important information about us. We then try to both stabilize how we can continue receiving this information and share our own, and we try to manipulate how positive the other person’s interpretation of us as information is so they don’t cut us off. Fun!

In good relationships, the learning is mutual, an exchange — of notes about the Other, the self, the world. (“How does the world work…”)

In important relationships, the information we think the other person has about us is vital. We feel like we can’t go on with our lives without knowing it. Every romantic couple thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: the parties feel like the other person has such deep insight into them that they then end up sharing a lot of personal things with each other that they’d never tell anyone else. In families, the information channels can get blocked which causes unhappiness: since the reality of a family always to some degree rests on nothing changing, individual information updates can be rejected or ignored.

The information exchange that takes place in mentorship is just as existential: it is about a person’s self-creation. A lot of things at the beginning hurt. Good mentors can both soften the blows by providing counsel and community, and show — through their own example — that there are later stages of this journey, and that it gets easier.

The truth is it doesn’t just get easier. I personally have never felt such sheer abundant joy and professional contentment — such hope — as in some of these collaborations. And so, despite the darker side, which we will also discuss, I will begin with this:

Joy

There is a time in the Jewish calendar for pretty much anything that can ever happen to a person, and so there is a time in the Jewish calendar dedicated to thinking about joy.

The Talmud gets my timidity of writing about something as personal as mentorship: the Jewish tradition understands that joy is a very fragile, very personal, embarrassingly intimate state — much more so than sadness which is always universal, always somewhat public.

Sadness is given to us by life; happiness is an individual achievement, a marriage of internal capacities and external conditions. And so it comes with the state of joy to be very afraid of losing it.

This means in joy we are quite vulnerable. There is a therapy-led misunderstanding that great relationships exist to save us from pain or help heal our past traumas. I think it’s the other way around. Strong relationships in fact are tasked with containing our joy — this uniquely disruptive emotion filled with childlike abandon and a very adult fear of loss — in which we stand most vulnerable.

The fact that an event as sensitive as people’s moments of self-creation — one’s professional birth — permits the presence of good mentors, that even such a fuzzy human arrangement can contain something this momentous for another person, proves to me that indeed real mentorship is one of the great relationships in life. That the intuition and desire to exchange information this way are warranted and can be fulfilled.

As I am typing this, I wonder if mentors, whose effect seems so robust, are only “mysterious” and fuzzy and hard-to-define in the modern sense — that they’re in fact a resurrection of earlier forms of human organization, that they work in a way our current society just doesn’t have a good vocabulary for.

The Fool will know.

*

Whenever I run into a confusion of concepts, I like to look at what other languages are doing about it. When I do this about mentors, I immediately realize that my mother tongue, Hungarian, doesn’t traditionally use this word at all. We do use “to mentor”, the verb, but for a person we use “mester” (master). In Hungarian, there is no secondary meaning to this word as “lord” or “owner” at all — the master is simply the guy who in a medieval town would be the senior blacksmith or carpenter, a master of practical skills leading a business and taking on apprentices whom he would initially train, then collaborate with, then make his heirs.

The secondary meaning of the word that Hungarian uses is artistic and spiritual. It is there in English too, consider the maestro, or the author fighting the Devil in The Master and Margarita. Recall the Zen master in the koan who refuses to come out of his cave until his disciple outside has reached enlightenment… Master Yoda… Or ask any chess player what “grandmaster” really means.

There is a useful pointer in this practical-spiritual double-entendre: medieval society, which in many ways was much wiser than our own, understood that matters of the hands and the soul are both forms of expertise requiring invitation, guidance, and graduation. That the difference between inner and outer forms of expertise is illusory.

In the long centuries when archetypes roamed the world, when tarot cards and astrological signs were just town jobs, when the stakes of life were very visceral and very obvious to everyone at all times, when people sought to be useful and good because they believed in judgment after death — which was frequent and soon and everywhere — people understood that acquiring and utilizing skills, whether religious or dexterous, were matters of the soul.

That what really was at stake was your soul.

Towns have changed but people have not changed a bit since then.

In languages where mentors are masters (who may or may not also choose to mentor, as a verb), it is implied that one can graduate from masters.

While “mentorship” may feel goalpost-moving and fuzzy, mastery implies eventual independence — shared work, equality, possible friendship. (The Master is not a master to Margarita.) It promises shared joy in shared obsessions. It promises shared possessions.

And so if you find yourself confused about how modern-day mentorship works and why in some people’s lives it is a baseline-defining experience, just think of it as a medieval morality play: Experience introduces Virtue to Youth… Wisdom wants to give long speeches. Joy comes in and knocks everyone on the head. And Death suddenly looks less spooky.

*

If you want to go even deeper in history, Confucius is another good place to stop. Those guys knew a lot about professional advancement and how it all was in the end a spiritual process. How all manual or mental expertise was meaningless if you strayed away from the Way, if you denied your soul.

In the Confucian philosophical guide I Ching — a great example of systematized mastery intended to help real-world decision-making — after many images of approach, learning, breaking through, and following, one arrives to the image of The Lake (which is also called: Joy).

This symbol (58) is of two lakes connected and replenishing each other so neither will run dry alone. It is also the symbol of talking, of conversation:

“Lakes resting one on the other:
The image of the JOYOUS.
Thus the Superior Man joins with his friends
For discussion and practice.”

In the I Ching’s intelligent cosmology — from which Leibniz deduced the binary system and invented information theory — it is understood that ‘“Superior Man” is an attainable state for anyone. That maturity is attained and expressed in mutuality. There is a community implied here, an invitation. And repetition, a future. Many centuries later this knowledge would be resurrected in texts by Goethe, Tocqueville, in the weak ties hypothesis, in the design of internet browsing.

If we accept that we are in the territory of joys and souls, that centuries if not millennia have been devoted to deciphering why mastery might move on a spiritual trajectory, it is worth looking at our confusions in more detail.

*

Right now in America, we use stupid words like “meaning” and “purpose” to avoid talking about our soul. To avoid talking about a wholesome internal life — intellectual, social, and moral. To avoid talking about the fact that people want to exist in ethical systems that they can trust. Ethical systems that trust them.

We don’t want to talk about what people truly decide on in the moments of choosing a life. We don’t want to admit to experiences where so much is at stake and where we have so few defenses. We don’t want the responsibility of irreversibility. We don’t want to publicly admit what really happens when you articulate who you want to be — and what happens when you find out who you can be. We don’t want to verbalize that when there is a difference between the two, processing that is a process.

We do retain some Aristotelian intuitions that the medievals were so into — we say “calling” sometimes, and “work-life balance” a lot. We tell people to lift weights as a way to improve their mood, to go touch grass. That their gut bacteria affect their thinking and so probiotics will help temper that existential terror…

These are our current feeble attempts at formulating that we wish we were on a course in a promising direction that is both spiritual (intellectual) and practical (material). The understanding that this course is impossible to get on alone, and that it is JOY that signals to us when we are on it, was somehow thrown out with all the other religion stuff, leaving us with no categories to grab onto, just these wordless sensations that we all feel.

And the inkling that in specific arrangements, certain people can build this kind of joy together.

Bildung.

That sometimes there is a conflict between the practical and the spiritual — that what you do with this discrepancy matters very much. That in fact everything in life depends on this.

And so it has become just hard to talk about what is taking place in the mutuality that leads to mastery — also known as: mentorship. The fact that mentorship is a form of world-building, where words create reality, where both the spiritual and the physical/material conditions are affected.

*

Three factors must be discussed first:

(1) Service:

The fact that what people seek in life is social utility. We don’t talk about this lest it evokes hierarchies, subjugation.

Yet the question that fidgets underneath all human ambition is timeless and elementary: Am I going to be useful?

And so — Accepted?

And so — Will I live?

(2) Freedom:

That people don’t like to be subjugated into the service of anything or anyone against their will — but they do desire commitments they could choose freely, so that they and the world can feel whole.

That after the tests and trials that one has undergone freely, one wants to reach higher levels of freedom. Not just through the autonomy that comes from expertise, utility, and social contribution, but also in the spiritual sense. Spiritual freedom is called salvation. There is a freedom in finding equilibrium, becoming one’s true self, living up to one’s potential, being able to take an opportunity. There is a freedom in knowing you’re doing the right thing.

Mastery is thus liberating in the technical but also in the spiritual sense. It can give you the tools you need to become and then live as yourself.

We all sense that liberation, redemption, and salvation are big, load-bearing concepts, and most people feel queasy throwing these words around when describing their own lives. But these words are there for describing real world lives, events, desires. You. Me.

And most people — if they were lucky and found help, then only when they are young — feel at least slightly misplaced in the world, and want passionately to find a better fit: peers, reassurance, relief. If most people didn’t feel like they had been born into at least the slightly wrong place, we wouldn’t have a universal Hero’s Journey at all.

But you don’t hear anyone mentioning redemption, lest it sounds too depressed, too religious. And yet, aren’t we all asking, at some point, at the beginning, or when going through great change: Is there a way out, up, away — toward ourselves?

What me do I have to abandon to become me?

(3) Love:

We most definitely don’t want to talk about love.

Even though we are deep in the realm of the inexplicable pushes and pulls between people which make little sense except emotionally. We don’t talk about this stuff lest it comes across as sexualized, or discriminatory, or — worse — both.

The thing is life is sexualized, it is discriminatory — full of connections and curations, fears, longing, and injustice. Making things non-zero-sum takes constant work, campaigning, and care, making this a great filter for finding the right collaborators, the right companions in life.

And so the question of love (choice + attachment) remains the eternal irritant between people, a challenge as old as the human family and the human intellect:

Is ours an encounter that is generative, or am I locked into a solitary fantasy where I just regurgitate my past and what I already know?

When we talked about redemption, we said people want peers, reassurance, relief. We can change up the order and say: all people want reassurance (service — “You are useful.”), relief (freedom — “You can be saved.”), and peers (love — “You are not alone.”).

When you look at these three things, you should immediately think: citizen. Images flare up of the ethical life. Of the member of a free society who can work, think, and associate freely. Of a knowledge of this that is passed down from generation to generation.

*

We shy away from talking about love also because we then would have to talk about luck — external circumstances — and talent — internal circumstances — . It would make it clear that life is rather unfair. Most people don’t meet the love of their lives in high school and spend a lifetime together. Most people never find the golden ticket to life-transforming mentorship and reach their fullest potential.

I have two things to say about this.

One: The fact that acquiring these treasures is possible but not guaranteed should make you more motivated to seek them, not less. Cynicism only makes finding them even less likely.

Two: Living with luck, talent, and stubborn attachments is not a recipe for happiness. Living in communion with others this way comes with very specific duties and difficulties. Closing an investment round, getting a book deal, or the birth of your baby is where all the work begins. Even winning a big prize is often just a prelude to a major effort.

These are nevertheless the good problems to have. All good relationships run on love — so it can be more than just a transaction, or competition, or extraction. So now information can be freely and mutually shared.

That sharing is JOY. At the beginning and during transitions people stand vulnerable. Joy exposes us and makes us worried about loss. Developmental psychologists insist that love is a prerequisite of all childhood learning: the attention, the positive reinforcement, is what locks in the new information, it is the confirmation that the learning has happened. It makes me wonder if what love does to us in all our important relationships is make us forever beginners.

*

Of course, if a math teacher started talking about how much she loves her pupils and wants to ensure they are prepared for service, and if a student of hers started talking about how much they want to be liberated or redeemed by that teacher, both would quickly find themselves in some therapist’s office, or worse.

And so these feelings vibrate in our relationships that are tasked with shared ideation and mutual betterment, unspoken.

The job of the Fool is to say things that others won’t. But it’s not just a matter of will — we often can’t talk very clearly about our more mysterious, one-off types of relationships, however important. Metaphors and comparisons are sometimes helpful.

In the case of mentors, people first bring up parental analogies. I think this cheapens it and removes the core problem of individual choice and interpersonal loyalty. Family is easy to talk about because we all understand the lack of control that comes with being related to arbitrary people and having to somehow deal with that. When it comes to our mentors and mentees, on the other hand, we have too much control and, subsequently, responsibility.

It is also not useful to compare these arrangements — which so often include more than two people anyway — to romantic couples. Romantic love is the original cliché, with the Lego bricks of our entire cultural history available to build from. If all lovers are similar, then mentors and mentees are always too original. How to generalize across a bunch of weirdos who are happy to cause mayhem in entirely new forms of relating just to pursue an idea or plan?

And so, both as mentor and mentee, I find myself in the wilderness. A Wild West of human relationships where anything can happen — no holds barred in some very real way. We’re in a territory of nothing but the human character in raw interaction — I’m not going to say “unguarded” because people of course devise all sorts of tactics to protect themselves, but given the lawlessness of the game, most of these strategies fail. The standard institutional structures and norms are not there to mediate, and so it is just character clashing with character. And all this happens during vitally important decisions in vitally important moments with vitally important people.

We are in the territory of theater, but the blood is real.

We know instinctively that this is ART, artistic collaboration, artistic creation. Just like in groups that create art, mentorships also throw us back into times before explicit social contracts, into a world of clans. Each clan in some sense makes its own law so that it can hold the big characters and the big stakes. The reason why great mentor relationships are so unique, so different one from the other, is because they were each created from scratch. And why the best mentors tend to have had great mentors themselves where they learned and apprenticed so they can arrive into these new relationships of their own with at least a little head-start.

The purgation in this kind of emergent self-organization is that at least at the beginning many mentorships will reflect earlier personal life dramas — the shadows of parents and children, of siblings and marriages — as participants work on figuring out just how they can build out for themselves a functioning information system that sparks joy. Bildung.

A relationship built this way is always a zero-to one, creative act, a one-off — terrifying and inimitable.

*

Many friendships are also forged in the “Wild West” of human connection. Outside of school or the workplace, religious or military settings, friends are free to negotiate whatever their bond means to them. The difference is that in mentorship, making crucial life decisions is the default. This is less common in friendships, unless you go to war together, perform open-heart surgery on children together, or climb Mount Everest tied to the same rope — all of which can of course happen. In the end, many mentorships turn naturally into friendships, often once the great decisions have already been made and the stakes have normalized.

Friendship might be a form of philosophy. Mentorship is always an art. Art as both form and content — material and spiritual.

Even at its most intense, joy is intangible, invisible, logos. In the next section, therefore, we will look at what happens when our ideas take shape in the real world, when risks are real and invoices have to be paid.

The physical manifestation of joy is pleasure, and I will argue that despite the many complications arising when real money, time, and bodies are at stake, co-creation is one of the great pleasures of human life, in fact our greatest —

Adventure

If mentorship is an artform, then these relationships must be a Gesamtkunstwerk, synthesizing so many different types of attachment, expression, aesthetics, and excellence. Because this kind of creation is so ready to hold together so many contradictions, it is also able to absorb many different types of characters and interests. When they feel like they’re on the right track together — when they feel free, accompanied, and utile — people who would have never otherwise associated will become super-productive soulmates.

One of my most formative memories of childhood is about the workshop. Throughout the 1980s my parents created and ran Hungary’s most popular TV show — this was in the era of the “one TV channel television”, and so basically everybody in the country with access to TV would watch that. My father produced and sometimes directed the episodes, and my mother played the title character. Every week, I remember the members of the senior crew arriving to our Budapest apartment overlooking the Danube and the Parliament’s spires. These men and women — writers, cameramen, editors, interns — sat with their notepads and cigarettes in our living room, and created the TV show which then millions of people would watch together. My childhood was far from idyllic but I know viscerally that what I saw in that living room week after week was happiness.

A big room with a view and hardwood flooring, a coffee table, a couple of worn sofas: maybe not how the medieval mason would imagine a workshop. But the location, the physicality almost didn’t matter — what mattered was the pleasure of togetherness. People arrived with less mastery, and left with more. People arrived with vague ideas, and left with concrete plans for rearranging reality. These changes arose from their characters colliding. Mentorship, challenge, mutual support.

The workings of the workshop have never stopped fascinating me. The fact that as few as two people can come together and become a productive community. That like some genetic code, like the spider its web, people spill out these containing structures around themselves that predate all the polite HR talk. That we all carry this DNA of spontaneous, chosen, from-scratch families in which the most ethereal intellectual developments can unfold and in which people can feel free.

The Fool, as usual, will look around in history, to see if previous times might have been better at concretizing how this can happen.

*

A few years ago when I read Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall I was struck by what she seems to have figured out about the workings of the “household”. (Somehow no one ever brings up this part of the book?!) My friend, the history professor Erica Robles-Anderson, always talks about the oikos — the household — as the core of the economy.

How Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell runs his household in the book reminded me in a fundamental way of how I run my startup Interintellect: after Penelope’s and the Durrells’, Cromwell’s might be literature’s OG “family firm”, comprised of his relations, allies, and a hand-picked squad of intelligent young men and women that he’s training the same way as at the beginning of the story, in his own youth, Cromwell himself apprenticed to the soon-to-be fallen cardinal Wolsey. If you noticed the combination of practical/political + spiritual here too, well done.

Century after century, societies change and improve, and yet these clan-like organizations persist. They seem to form automatically in human communities, and succeed at containing human events of life/death importance. These units lead to unthinkably good outcomes the participants would never have been able to reach alone: in art, business, science, or grassroots politics the right combination of people — duos, groups — can win big. (Consider the great praxis of famous mentors like Tyler Cowen, an artist who invented his own artform.)

The dark side of “clannishness” is that groups that make their own internal laws and are quite obscure to outsiders can also degenerate into awful examples of cults, fanaticism, abuse. We started with the three rules — service, freedom, and love — because the removal of just one of these will make the formation less healthy and less stable, if not altogether horrible.

This spectrum is indeed wide: individually negotiated creative partnerships can be the biggest, most amazing adventure in life, or something unpleasant, or even disastrous. The spectrum is so wide because of how high the stakes involved: when we enter these information systems, we bring with us the fundamental stressors of human existence. Who am I? What do I do with myself? What is a person for?

In the crucibles where these questions are decided, a lot of things can happen. People who want to be seen as “weirdos” (but aren’t) like to criticize “group think” and “decisions by committee”, as if n+1 people would always mean worse. This has not been my experience: finding just one good collaborator can make you and your decisions much more extreme, and when the direction is good, “more extreme” is good news.

A good community can make all the participants move much faster in the good direction. Unlike superficial friendships, the very raw and artistic friendship that is mentorship has practically no middle class: ye who enter here will either become very good, or leave. This is not something people can half-ass, since the whole process is about concrete, even binary decision-making about life and self.

How to be good? How to be better? — These are not questions where the answer can be “Maybe”.

*

I have recently attended a dinner in New York, and when I revealed that I was working on an essay about mentorship, a vivid conversation sprang up among my friends.

The first thing they asked me was to try and define the term. They felt they had been sold a bunch of different notions of “mentorship” — but there was a great difference between the many types.

As I kept asking, two things became obvious. One is the dilution of the term “mentor” in America (looks like we’re not only using “purpose” and “meaning” wrong).

Apparently, a “mentor” these days can be…

• your former doctoral advisor with whom you build out a lifelong collegial relationship and who becomes the godmother to your first child

• a colleague at a new workplace whom you’re meeting for the first time, showing you where the coffee machine and the toilets are on the first week

• an intellectual elder you meet in the comment section under his article who becomes the primary blurb on your next novel’s dust jacket

• a person assigned to you by a stranger in a business accelerator because you work in vaguely similar fields whom you’ll never see again

• someone sitting next to you on a 90-minute flight whose words will stay with you as you navigate life forever… …

People to whom mentors were haphazardly assigned, or who accepted into their lives some mentor-wannabe promoting him or herself, now think mentorship doesn’t work, is just some kind of scam or urban legend.

People who found a transformative experience through someone else’s guidance or who were able to be there for an entrant through various life changes themselves think otherwise.

For some people, their “master” was their first boss. For some, their dad. For some, the one who got away… The one thing everybody agrees on — recall how we established mentorship as one of life’s important relationships — is that When You Know You Know.

That the category comes into existence when you respond to it emotionally and undergo some change. That masters, mastery, and choosing a life for oneself are of vital importance, and so you know when it’s happening by how important it is to you.

From his or her end, a good mentor also — consciously or instinctively — picks and guides mentees based on how important this whole thing is to the mentees. You can’t help people to whom their own selves and futures are not important enough. And if you are a mentor, you can tell how important a mentee’s self and future are to them by how important you are to them. (How much is this person betting on this?)

I warned you early on that we’re in an emotional, seemingly irrational, often selfish territory of self-creation. Self-creation — even when those ethereal values and heavenly joys are included — is a greedy venture. There is always a demand that is being expressed here, because we’re in lawless country where, as in a family or in a couple, there are no real rights. In some elemental way, the mentees have to show their teeth and fight, and not care what anybody thinks. To come and get it... Self-creation, for everyone, is always hard and always earned.

*

I never consciously sought mentors until my work became vitally important to me.

In an unconscious way, maybe. The child psychology pioneer Nicholas Garmezy found that most children who grow up in dysfunctional families will go on to fall out of school, develop behavior disorders, and never fully integrate into society. But to his surprise he noticed that around 25% of these kids — likely due to sheer genetic luck — will develop strategies to avoid this fate. One of these strategies is, for example, mentally re-framing difficulties as challenges to learn from. Another is that the child will go and acquire mentors, external sources of security and certainty.

I definitely did this when I was a child: in absence of an extended family I could rely on (a household, a clan) I acquired for myself a whole arsenal of hopefully helpful adults from godparents to priests, from older schoolmates to my dad’s girlfriends, basically anyone who felt safer than the world and who could help me understand the world better.

When I was a young woman I was very pretty and very insecure, and so, to avoid giving myself “problems”, during the intellectually most agile and formative years of my life I had to mostly steer clear of older, powerful men who were not immediate family, which for a while greatly restricted my access to knowledge and instruction. In those “jeune fille en fleur” years I felt safest in the library, where I indulged in solo-mentoring, AKA reading every book I could get my hands on. After a while, I started building strong intellectual friendships with men, sometimes online or via correspondence, and learned that — as Alice Evans argues — friendship truly can be a truce in the battle of the sexes.

Until my late 20s, I never felt like I should build a career. I had my writing, which made me no money, and thanks to the other side of my personality which likes to meddle and is generally a busybody, I earned a living via all sorts of fun activities like lecturing at the university, writing articles, translating books, managing bands, building a women’s rights platform, shooting commercials, and so on. In my literary life I never wanted mentors: the great writers tend to be antisocial or insane, and in any case they can’t explain to you how to write; I knew even as a teenager that one learns how to write by reading, and that writing advice like “always sit next to a window” or “edit in the morning” are bullshit. The men who proactively tried to give me advice as a young poet I was wary of. The one true genius I met in those years thought I was a brat and that my poetry was terrible.

On the other hand, my busybody professional life exposed me to a lot of very interesting and intelligent people, often at the top of their fields. But because whatever job I was doing under their hands wasn’t vitally important to me, they too never became vitally important. There was nothing at stake for me, and so our transactions never became relationships.

A person’s desire to find help with getting better comes from having found the thing they want to get better at. It starts, I guess, when your adult identity starts. Or maybe it should be called an “intellectual puberty” that hits one in adulthood. For some people, of course, this happens at a very young age. For some people later, or never. I was almost 30 when I first grasped the stakes.

Since then I’ve had some quite cathartic experiences both as a mentee and, more recently, as a mentor. My first two mentors I lost when I left their field; our relationships, for various non-problematic reasons, never morphed into a friendship. I lost my only real writing (well, screenwriting) mentor due to the jealousy of a third party. In another life, that would have been an excellent collaboration.

My most recent “loss”, around five years ago, was a mentorship that never happened, I was just lobbying for it. It taught me something that’s probably obvious to everybody else which is that people are not who they say they are in their books. That joke is on me.

These days, the handful of people I view as my mentors vary in age and in character; with each we have built a specific kind of relationship or are in the middle of building one. As I get older, our exchanges become more mutually instructive, more equal. I would say most of them are today friends. (Not in the English sense, but as amicus/-a, someone who is loved.)

Mentorship is complicated but not for the reasons superficial observers would tell you. Sure, it is competitive to get into one. Sure, class and geography can create hurdles. Yes, the Me Too movement happened for a reason, because for a long time bad people got away with bad behavior within relationships of trust.

But these to me feel circumstantial, not inherent difficulties. I think there are inherent difficulties about mentor-mentee pairings and adjacent groups that can be better understood using metaphors such as clans or the theater — because they are problems that arise from within human nature, not arbitrary social situations.

And so in the next section I want to talk about things like talent, rejection, rivalry, and rebellion — the big human forces that are always present, even in the most carefully selected, most virtuous settings. They are simply the baggage people bring with themselves into every room they enter. And when in the room that they are entering they seek to improve themselves and confirm their identities, this baggage will not stay unpacked for long.

*

Exploring contradictions is one of my favorite hobbies, and the matter of mentorship spoils us with examples.

Somehow popular psychology convinced the world that people like to give and receive the same way. I chuckle at this every time I read about “love languages”, fully conscious that for me — and I’m pretty sure this is quite common — giving and receiving love work completely differently!

In my case: the currency of my job is default enthusiasm. As a result, I express my love with genuine enthusiasm. (If you like a blasé girl, there’s nothing for you here, please move on.) However, as a downside of my job, I distrust the enthusiasm of other people, in fact I completely tune it out. The only way one can prove oneself to me is through perseverance. After a while — years? —, my distrustful brain calculates that any calculating enthusiasm must have worn out by now, and I start trusting the positivity shown to me as possibly genuine (but I keep in mind it can still be lost in an instant anytime, and so there is no reason to take it for granted or anything).

I’m mentioning this because this is a rather big delta, and it shows you how people — even when they seem relatively well-adjusted like I sometimes manage to do — don’t really need any external help to bring these giant contradictions to the table.

If you want to build such an important relationship as with a mentor or a mentee, it’s wise to start by examining the first, most obvious, contradiction at hand: that we all are very different people as mentors and as mentees.

As a mentee, for example, I tended to be like a philosophical five year old who asks mentors to explain not just why the sky is blue, but what it means. Most of my queries — except during exceptionally trying times — revolved around the Big Questions. About life, society, why people do what they do. It must have been very annoying. I never exactly asked “How can God allow such bad things to happen”, but almost.

As a mentor, influenced by my own past experiences of always just hearing about Rayleigh scattering and theodicy but never getting much practical help, I now support my mentees who sign up for my program The GrownUp Table in very mundane ways: money, introductions, links, referrals, etc. Detailed, concrete advice about life’s problems. I listen, and listen.

I know I have a lot of responsibility there, and so in the process of trying to be more self-honest and helpful, I happen upon all sorts of paradoxes in my own behavior. How hard it is to convince me to join other people’s communities — while I have been running my own for many years. How I get jealous and sad when I see how much practical support and cheerleading my male colleagues get — but I am not sure I would accept the same help so readily these days. Etc. Etc.

I am starting to think these idiosyncrasies — this being in the middle — are really just what middle age is like, this stage in life where you’re somehow playing both teams and neither. And so we look to friendship, love, shared obsessions and passions to help contain it all. People know deeply and instinctively that love-based relationships are personal breakthroughs that then lead to social, structural breakthroughs. It is human sympathies, always, that subvert the material conditions.

Being in the middle — in age and in career — has been very beneficial for my fuzzier relationships. Middle age is a great leveler. Everybody’s exhausted all the time, you can complain to each other, dad jokes are welcome… The baby photos only get more adorable with each passing year. I am all in to hear about new musicals and protein shakes, to celebrate someone’s eldest’s high school graduation, or real estate purchase, or the publishing of their new book, and I love investing in each other’s companies.

Whether it is explicit or implicit, communal or solo, mentoring or being mentored, it does feel good and natural to age into the middle, and see what love can build when you really care, and that it lasts.

Bildung.

*

A great way to build anti-nihilism is by caring for your mentees. The great ROI of mentoring for the mentor is hope. Mentors and mentees are trading with each other, and what they are trading is stability for hope.

The fuzzy system that mentorship is can build the ad-hoc structures that contain the joy, innovation, and creativity responsible for this hopefulness so that the trade can be ongoing.

This trade, of course, creates peace and abundance.

A lot of these processes are deterministic, meaning once you have set up certain conditions — once you have made certain decisions or commitments — specific series of events will logically follow. (Unless you break out of them, change the conditions, etc.) Mentors tend to disagree just to what degree different phenomena are deterministic. Their opinion about this greatly nuances which parts of another person’s life and career they will want to get involved in, where they feel they can be the most useful or collaborative.

To illustrate a couple of different takes on determinism, I will use the example of the brilliantly written TV show, Mad Men, since the show is, first and foremost, about talent. (Also because I think it’s one of the best dramatic writing ever produced in history — Proust would have been writing things like this if he had been born in the 1960s.)

If you watch it carefully, you will notice that Mad Men is in equal parts materialistic (conditions) and idealistic (individual will). In the world of the TV show, some phenomena are subject mainly to conditions, while other phenomena depend on individual ability, choice, free will. In simpler terms, some events the characters can alter or fight freely, and some events alter and fight them. (The whole series should be titled “Talent and Love in America — A Philosophical and Sociological Investigation of Materialism and Idealism; 1961-1970”, but that would sell less well….)

In Mad Men, most love is shown as conditional, subject to circumstances. Most personal values are shown as held inherently by people — the values don’t change when circumstances change. The most important value in the show’s universe is talent. Talent is shown as the least affected by the outside world, by external change.

Consider some examples:

• Don Draper’s marriage to his second wife Megan disintegrates when her situation changes — when she leaves her job, moves to California, discovers new aspects of her personality and ambition, Don falls out of love with her.

• Don’s personal moral code persists wherever he happens to be, sometimes to unsavory or comical effects.

• His talent — or the talent of his protégé Peggy - are also completely undisturbed by the frequent job moves and company M&As…

This surely is one worldview. In my personal experience, it’s just one of the many possible ways things can turn out. In real life, there is love that survives change. (In fact that might be the very definition of love!) It can be stubborn, something that just won’t die.

On the other hand, a lot of talent can be as sensitive to external conditions as a butterfly’s wings. How many gifted people you know who simply lost their mojo in a new situation that was just slightly different from their previous one? This is eerily common; there’s a reason why high performing people are so superstitious about random habits or objects — swimmers their slippers, Go players their mugs — and try to avoid change.

As a mentor, just like Don Draper and the great writers who created him, you too will have a specific worldview about what is internally vs externally deterministic.

(When leaving her mentor — as it later turns out: temporarily — Don’s protégé Peggy says to him: Don’t be a stranger.)

Examining your worldview is always useful. Where a mentor locates causality (circumstances vs will) determines what advice they give and which lever they try to pull. If you believe that people just have to move to the right city or get a Patagonia jacket or “drop the The” for their talents to flourish, your advice around talent will be materialistic. If you think people are born with a potential and that potential will bubble up regardless of where they go or whom they spend time with, you will need to be cognizant that you are likely an idealist. Both routes have upsides and downsides.

*

Mentor-adjacent communities are a great place for softening dichotomies such as between materialists and idealists. In a well-run household, there can be a place for many different types of character.

We have discussed solitary mentorship (reading, fantasies), the primordial chaos of intense 1:1 relationships, and the importance of the clan-like — almost pre-modern — creative community.

Anyone who takes their work and mission seriously should seek out all three types of mentorship at least once in their lifetime, with special attention to programs — in my world these are Y Combinator, Emergent Ventures, Thiel Fellowships, the OSV Fellowship; all life-changing organizations — that can offer all three at once.

Where this is not possible, you may want to listen to Katherine Boyle, and build yourself a “mentors portfolio”, a list of people and their guidance that you find useful. And if, for whatever reason, you don’t end up finding the exact guidance that you need, you might still one day become a master to others yourself, the same way some of the best parents and teachers strive to give younger people what they themselves wish they had had.

Mentors who are interested in talent at scale will want to engineer conditions that make this feasible. If you browse X and encounter long threads by billionaires trying to figure out whether four or five geniuses per office is the right number, you can tell just how mysterious these chemistries are, even at the highest level.

The most successful mass-mentoring programs that I have seen tackle this problem by (1) understanding that “at-scale” means having to build a community so the founding mentors are not in the center of every relationship at all times, and (2) creating a balance of three forms of interaction that promises to be sustainable and to boost each other in the long run.

These three are:

(1) Support

Mentoring programs that successfully establish the right conditions for talent to be discovered and to grow always offer some form of one-sided support. This means that someone senior in the organization — the leader, the midlevel, or senior members — can give advice, help put out fires, share useful resources, or just … sometimes … listen.

Without this altruistic support, mentorship programs will come to resemble meat markets, where especially the younger mentees will feel like they are being watched indifferently for sink-or-swim signals. Without support, the communities will also risk becoming just workaholic sweatshops focused on competition and output.

(2) Competition

A strong community around any mentorship program will be ripe with friendly competition. You can’t really “raise people’s aspirations” without people starting to compare themselves with each other, and taking cues, taking action. Good mentorship is fundamentally meritocratic, and thus also capitalist. In competition with one another, mentees will grow faster and bolder, and in the end achieve more. Since they can count on support, it will not feel like a Battle Royale, it will not become zero-sum.

Competition within a safe space is how small labs and scenes become so successful, and mentorship programs can imitate that structure at a wider scale. Without competition, mentees who are expected to fight and improve would grow complacent. It is never a bad idea to keep people that you want to achieve a lot on their toes!

(3) Collaboration

Something we rarely discuss outside the oeuvre of notable serial co-writers like Paul Erdős or Cass Sunstein is that mentees want to work with mentors — recall the medieval workshop — such collaborations being the ultimate proof that they are graduating from the program. As it was for the master blacksmith in his 12th century workshop, so it is today in intellectual and artistic sceniuses.

Without collaboration, support will feel condescending, and competition pointless and heartless. It is tough to do at scale, but it’s important for members to feel that there is at least a chance for eventual co-creation. This really is the ultimate form of invitation and, luckily, for most mentees a simple gesture will do.

*

Be prepared that even a fully balanced triad of these can’t always hold back the sneaky beasts lurking in the muddy waters between equality and meritocracy. In fact, throwing a lot of crazy ambitious high achievers into one arena before they have become fully confident or autonomous is a great way to rouse them.

But the equality vs meritocracy conundrum isn’t the only issue that mentor-adjacent communities will deal with. There is also the hard fact of life which is that however humanistic and harmonious a talent incubator and support program might be, the individuals within it will have to exhibit some very inhumane traits in order to achieve great things.

This isn’t something Instagram influencers and fridge magnets will tell you about. But we all know, deep down, that the activities required for significant, outlier lifetime achievement can be pretty unhealthy. You already know that people ruin their backs and eyes reading and coding. How they forget to file their taxes while finishing their books. How they stay locked up in their studies to the dismay of their families, how they stay up all night and look like zombies the next day. Plants die, dogs go unfed, and cats pee into bathtubs in the homes of the exceptional. Analysts’ couches are teeming with people who grew up with high-achieving parents. People get angry, depressed, and hyper when working super hard. People feel lonely, go bankrupt, and are left by girlfriends when doing their best work. Before successful people get all dolled up for award shows, there are all the decades spent with a much less elegant appearance. (I am typing this at 4 am with ice-cold fingers, wrapped into a stretched out cardigan.)

There really are but a few types of relationships that can make this process less jarring — there are people who can pull us out into the light, at least to give us brief breaks. Some, sharing joy through collaboration, might even join us in our rabbit holes of achievement. Some, through sharing wisdom and showing us a more mature version of ourselves, might help make our workshops feel sacred and our efforts more worthwhile. A lot of greatness is born in dark places, but it doesn’t have to live there.

When we are that mess, it is our lovers and relations, our friends and our mentors — our loved ones — who will see us. The beginnings are expected to be hard. These intermezzos always come as a surprise.

You will hope that determinism is on your side. And you get it on your side by choosing the right people.

*

Due to the fuzziness of their category, and because they sit somewhere between the world of friends/family and output/work, mentors can feel like guides between the public and the private realms. Many of them see themselves as gatekeepers. This is one of those gates.

If you are currently looking for a mentor, you will want to choose someone who is equally comfortable with your public self and private self. People who love the public you but can’t accept the “backstage” you in moments when you’re less ready, less sure, less fun, might be the perfect promoters but not necessarily mentors. People who thrive on your weakest private moments where they can feel useful but are envious, dismissive, or overly critical of your public work may be adequate coaches, but their approach seems less than holistic and you might want to keep looking.

As a male mentee, you will want to be careful with mentor candidates who praise you onstage but who chastise you for having weaker moments or reaching out for help. Sure, anyone might perform public admiration if it makes them look more in the know. Not good enough.

As a female mentee, you will want to be careful with potential male mentors who want information from you, or your attention, or to be entertained by you in private, but whose public appropriation of you — acknowledgement, collaboration — doesn’t match their backstage zeal. These are things you shouldn’t have to ask for… My general rule is: “If you think I’m so smart that you want my ideas, then this is something more people should know about.” As a woman, unless they put you on a stage — a mentor is an invitation — they might not be such mentors to you after all. Remember that everything around a woman is set up to infantilize you and make you think you have to lower your expectations. Don’t.

In general, as a woman or otherwise underprivileged entrant, assume that you have already paid an enormous price to even get anywhere near a mentor, and just stop paying the penalty even if others act like you need to pay it forever. As a man, surrounding yourself with people who make you feel like you can’t fail (and so: improve) is a surefire way to be pushed off the course of your own talent and onto some normie road leading nowhere. The gravity of conformity is very strong for men; you will need to find a match who can help you become positively more extreme. Remember that everything around a man is set up to make you become disingenuous — as if the archetypal American couple were “Lying Man and Female Child”! — to pretend to be always strong, to stay with the pack. Don’t.

As a mentor myself, I try to speak openly about both my public and my private selves and the challenges thereof, so my mentees can feel that both are OK to have, and that it is OK if these two lifestyles are quite different.

The balance requires some ongoing effort. In the case of longterm mentorship, people’s situations can also change: mentors and mentees become more or less busy, more or less public, more or less wealthy, more or less interested in the minutiae of psychology as time goes by. I don’t think anybody can ever behave perfectly. But I know that love and care can go far in providing a buffer amid these many fluctuations.

In mentorship, the most brutal part of the public/private duality is rejection. Our mentors might not know as much about us as our friends, lovers, or family do, but it is still a uniquely information-dense relationship. And so being or even just feeling rejected by a mentor, who has such access to the thinking, the data, and the backstage, can feel disproportionately like some kind of apocalypse.

If rejection must happen, remember that mentors are tasked with giving feedback and guidance, and so I think it must come with some explanation that the mentee can then use constructively.

Perhaps you can tell that I am trying to ease you into the next section where we will discuss the harder aspects of mentorship, the stuff that — at least to me — are bewilderingly difficult.

I know this is America, and you’re not supposed to talk about how painful life is, and how much even good things can hurt — unless you’re Taylor Swift, I guess... Or dear Aella.

But I am not American.

Pain

It might indeed be the Eastern European in me talking, but I consider difficulty, even suffering, a natural part of life; I can’t imagine important projects, important places and, especially, important relationships, not to come with complications, not to create some pressure in my life that force me to grow and be better.

Mentorship is, in fact, the important relationship in life that we pursue for this very purpose: we want it to pressure us in some way — we hope not too painfully — so we can improve, break through, develop into masters ourselves.

We’ve already seen that this is a fuzzy, artistic type of relationship where a part of the energy is always spent on trying to ground the relationship itself into something sustainable. We’ve established that the stakes explored within mentorship are uniquely high: money, success, who we get to become and see ourselves as. This is just as true in duos as it is in groups, just as true for mentors as mentees. If your work and your life are important to you — and they are — then your mentors will be important to you.

And so mentorship already seems both quite unstable and insanely weighty when we consider that…

• learning is default painful and beginnings are often embarrassing (nobody looks very glam backstage)

• we seek out mentors who can pressure us to become better (and coexist with us when we have)

• if strong emotions — hope, love, respect — weren’t involved, the whole relationship wouldn’t exist in the first place

• due to the joys felt in shared collaboration, there is a fear of loss that informs behavior

• due to a lot of information being shared, rejection looms extra scary

• how creative groups — even two-member ones — amplify talent and personality, push them to extremes

• how even in harmonious arrangements, there lurk negative or destructive behaviors due to how competitive it all is and how hard the work is

• we fight for and earn mentorship during often long periods of time, and so these people in our lives are not so replaceable

…. and … long exhale.

Looking at my own list here, and thinking about the beloved mentors in my life today, the fact that any of these attachments were really stubborn enough to survive for as long as they have feels like winning some kind of uber-lottery. It makes me feel very blessed.

It also speaks to the power of cultivation — once again: connection + curation. Voltaire tending to his garden. That the threats are always there, so great, so constant, but one can always focus on just one little tree at a time.

Can it be that mastering the mastery is in itself an act of virtue where we acquire both practical and spiritual knowledge?

*

When prices are high, losses hurt like crazy. Especially in relationships that unfold in time, on the serpentine roads of real life, just what “winning” means is always changeable and elusive. In some sense, nobody “wins” in the long enough run. In the long enough run, you die.

Yet the only way not to involve your soul in this process — during which process you want to build real relationships and real mastery — is to not get involved at all. Bildung. So a lot is asked for here, and there is no clear or definitive victory in sight.

Tough.

The Fool sees the small feelings, the incertitude, the tears. Vulnerability. The down moments, the helplessness. That like all artistic collaborations, or the interpersonal events of families or faith, these associations are psychologically exposing.

Self-help literature addresses this exposure from the POV of personal agency: what you should do, how you should be more productive. But these psychological events are interactive, and they’re better understood as events within an information system where the information being exchanged is vital.

Good mentor-mentee duos or groups are both intimate and expansive enough so that the relationships can act as a kind of insurance. A mentorship that takes into account the pains of life will ensure that during hard times the mentee has continued access to good counsel and personal encouragement — and that during the less colorful periods of the mentor’s career, when they are not successful or popular enough (or anymore), they will still have access to the mentee’s energy, hope, information, and love. As we have seen before: these are not trivial matters. These are the moments that can make or break a career.

In those hushed corners, on the days we are not proud of, when we have to step up and do the hard thing, people can feel especially defenseless. And yet it is there that the really important connections are sealed and the truly life-changing decisions are made. In those moments we really are primal, primates — just parents and children, each all, held together by care. I like to joke that no one is truly an adult at the dentist’s, or with their pants down or skirt up at the doctor’s. Will I live? Will it hurt? — these are questions that can only be asked from a position of humility, whoever you otherwise are.

It is in the small moments that we understand that expertise is existential and learning is survival.

*

We started our investigation into mentorship by contrasting mentors with muses. This was not coincidental or just alliterative.

While my friend might be writing a book about the Muses in the Greek sense, I am far more interested in the people who swoop in from out of the blue, or whom we go and seek out, and who then have a great effect on our thinking and motivations. Unlike with mentors, this act of “being touched” seems one-sided and less an expression of personal taste or choice. Human muses don’t seem to want to build any kind of relationship with their happy victims, they might not even notice anything.

Some people might look like mentors but are in fact muses. And to some people who think we are mentors, we are in fact muses, too.

When this is the case, the importance and the impact are there, but the a mentee (a musee?) won’t feel like they’re securely part of an information system, or that there is some kind of insurance, or that they have been invited, granted entry, and now it is a reliable relationship. (Curation yes — connection uncertain.)

Before, during, and since the formation of Interintellect, the cultural conversation platform that I run, I have come into contact with some of the most exciting minds active today, from teenagers to octogenarians, in America and abroad, and with some of them mentorship and apprenticeship — collaboration and friendship — are natural questions that will arise.

However fuzzy their category might be, you can usually tell a mentor by how they are an invitation — an intervention. On the other hand, muses visit by invocation: you need something specific from them, and you might get it. It is a one-sided illumination — in practice, it is when it’s always one person asking, one person calling, one person travelling, one person needing, one person trying, one person growing. (In my case, if it is always I who invite somebody in, I know.) While mentorship is a moral technology, muses are amoral, unaware of ethics. They don’t want to be your role models or to improve on your identity. They don’t update their treatment of you based on your progress: a muse will suggest the same good idea to a 19 year old student and a 79 year old Nobel laureate, while a mentor grows his or her opinion of you as you grow and adjusts their advice. And so with muses there can be serving, even saving maybe, but no loving. It is not a community. Muses glimpse our hunger but not our vulnerability. Muses remain strangers.

*

Apart from vulnerability — psychological exposure — as an internal condition unavoidable in important relationships where major personal development and decisions are taking place, there is also an external condition that good mentorship can contain. Crisis.

Since we don’t have many workable, established concepts for the extra-institutional world of mentorship today, this type of relationship always creates its own order, leading to the existence of longterm duos and groups resembling creative collaborators. Because its order is self-invented and individually negotiated, some of these relationships will end up being in fact much stronger than what normie collegiality or weak ties would provide. And so in times of crisis, often these are the only people in one’s life who can offer some sanity, reassurance. Insurance.

As a mentor, you will want to be especially careful to notice crises. Crises are decisive moments, that’s when people either transform into something stronger and better, or they will drop out and disappear. As a mentor, you should NEVER be indifferent about this — both because caring about mentees is your individual contribution to anti-nihilism, and because of the great social utility of keeping talent at work. Indifference is never a neutral, passive standpoint of “waiting it out” but the very opposite of involvement: where involvement actively tilts the mentee away from the chaos and back into the clan, indifference pushes her outside, signals that the connection has not happened, and that the best she can hope for is, if she somehow survives alone, a muse. (“Muddle through and then write about it.”)

People famously think they would notice if someone was drowning. They imagine themselves sitting on the beach and hearing the loud cries, then heroically running with the others toward the waving drowner Baywatch-style, and dragging him out of the water. Of course, those with any lifeguard training know this is not at all how people drown — in fact in moments determining life/death people go strangely quiet and motionless, both because of the shock and because all energy is being spent on not dying. The same happens with people in a major crisis. While mentees will always either complain or flex to mentors — there is so much chatter — the real problems are eerily quiet. Having some way of keeping track of people’s life events, behavior changes, and subtle signals (is a mentee suddenly asking for help about a different thing?) will go a long way.

Mentors are not responsible for the life decisions of mentees, of course. If a mentee decides to quit and go AWOL, they are free to do so. But mentors and mentees, in a dialectical sense, are fully and at all times responsible for the relationship they have built together. And if a life crisis on either side would mean the breakdown of this relationship, then that is a time to show care for sure.

*

In my adult life, I’ve had two major life crises so far. One happened in January 2015, when a violent event shook my life and forced me to start rebuilding it from basically zero. The initial dark night of the soul lasted about 20 months, and then it took me around six more years to get on the right track with my life. These things take time.

The other crisis was quite recent and lasted from March 2024 until about May 2025, during which I went through (1) major and sudden bereavement, (2) cross-continental relocation and related immigration, administration, and financial processes, and (3) had to solve a critical upheaval at my company that I had zero training for. All the while (4) I couldn’t write which made me feel like a shameful slacker who was being pushed farther and farther away from intellectual companionship and losing everybody’s respect.

The 2015 crisis cycle I did with no functioning mentorship in sight (although I did get a lot of help by muse-like visitors — drive-by support, ideas, pointers). One of the reasons why I think that one lasted so long… On the other hand, during this recent one I had various systems around me technically able to support me. It was still unthinkably difficult.

Some conditions no mentorship — whether pairing or clan — can fix because they’re a part of its very structure. And so if you’re in a crisis already, the psychological exposure can be yet another problem to deal with. In my case, for example, moving to the USA in the middle of my annus horribilis upset the status quo of my support systems and sent many of my relationships of vital importance through fundamental changes themselves. “Not living in the USA” turned out to have been one of my pillars in these important, from-scratch relationships, it was part of my role in the clan. Until then to some degree I was a kind of fantasy, living in other people’s heads, and much more under their imaginative control — a parasocial creature without a Social Security number. Being finally in town now with my post code and CVS card was a baseline change in the determinism. (And so for a while I just didn’t know where to go! If both being and not being here come with so much loss.) Renegotiating vitally important relationships while going through hard times was hard, and it’s in some sense an ongoing process.

In a crisis, the love that is the basis of all good mentorship can also complicate the external and internal conditions, and mentorship once again can’t fix a condition that is itself. During my year of mourning, for example, I had to also process the unbearable notion that the next one to go would now be my most important mentor, and that if things go well and we both live long lives, I would still have to live out decades of my life with him gone — and then what will become of me, what will I do... This added a secondary layer to my already great grief, a nightmarish memento mori that is latently there in every key relationship and that sometimes comes and headbutts you in the face.

And so the crisis felt like some kind of torture. I can’t remember any other time in my life when I felt such a crushing mental anguish; even my body hurt, my internal organs. For a while I was absolutely sure that I had failed as a person, that I had lost everything and everyone, or would soon do. That I had ruined everything, that everything was a lie — what I thought was security or certainty. And it went on for months and months. There were moments when I felt I would lose it, honestly, just give up, drop out. Run away.

And then I didn’t. In fact I had to go and somehow completely rethink everything to be able to go on with my life. And I am glad I did.

I was left with some very surprising lessons like … love wins. That whoever and whatever is strong in one’s life, survives.

I also learned that having previously reoriented my life toward what truly matters to me had made me selfish in a way I don’t think I ever was before: I seem to now have the ability to hold on to things and people that are important to me not really caring how it looks, or whether it is “dignified” or cool. A lesson in connection + curation indeed. What me I had to abandon to be me.

And so maybe all of this was in fact a lesson in selflessness. Today I wonder if it hurt so much because I had to shed the old skin, to kill my ego. Let go of all the lies that I told myself. And whether it could finally happen at all because some security and certainty, however flawed, was there to hold me, to hold it all. That I was not really alone — and so I could crawl through that Purgatory and make it out.

… And then the Sun comes up, and one takes a deep breath, and goes back to the original question.

*

How to be good?

At what we do. As people. To each other.

How to be better?

In a mentor relationship, two people stand facing each other and try to do the right thing.

One person asks:

— Am I helping you right?

And the other person asks:

— Am I learning this right? Am I going to be alright?

We do all of this because we want to be better. Better humans. Better at being human.

The desperation with which we ask each other is what’s most mysterious and most hopeful to me about all this.

Our questions are already the answer in some way.

And the very fact that these questions are asked is proof that mentorship belongs in the realm of ethics. It is mutual Bildung. There is so much building going on: of the relationship, of a chest of drawers, a life skill, a soul. (“Building the builders!” — as Gena Gorlin would say.)

Since mentorship is an explicitly ethical relationship, in it selfishness and selflessness will clash — both between the various characters and inside people, internally.

The Kierkegaardian romantic in each of us will always strive to win this and to feel special, and will welcome any amplification of extremity that creative clanishness can offer.

All the while, the Hegelian paterfamilias in us wants clean systems and to feel like these unique interactions contribute to society at large in some substantive way. Those of us with an avid interest in how these fuzzy relationships, where stability and hope are in exchange, are built will hope they will indeed be able to contain all the egoism and vulnerability of the participants — our social successes and our private pains.

*

“- messze málló jósvonások nagy memento “M”-je vásog - minden alatt e nagy “M” láttalan és sejttelen - mérő szemeink elől a méretlenbe szétfolyó, -” — Mihály Babits

*

We talked about the psychological exposure and the life crises that complicate the deterministic processes even in a well-functioning mentorship relationship. We have understood that we’re in the kingdom of ethics where people go to become better. We intuit that there are two dimensions here, one public and one private. Our hope is that through these individually negotiated, complex and beautiful relationships we will acquire practical and spiritual mastery.

Given its internal and external risks, a relationship as important and as fuzzy as mentorship cannot be discussed without discussing also the world that surrounds it. There is a third condition that mentorship often can’t control as it is part of its own texture: Fame.

There is a joke that goes: “London has never improved anyone.”

I heard this when I was living in London. I tended to agree.

I think fame is like this too. Whoever you were when you became famous, whatever you then had in you, that is going to be you. You will keep that or lose that during your fame. Fame is not going to add anything to your life in an ethical sense.

Of course, most people do other things in life beyond being famous, and those other things nourish their lives to save it from stasis. But fame itself is a very tricky thing because famous people grow a secondary persona, a second life. Being in any kind of relationship with a famous person is like being in a relationship with at least two people at the same time (two of whom, being aspects of the same person, will be of course much closer to each other than you can ever get to either of them). Famous people, in this sense, always cheat on you with themselves. (If they’re also addicted, then they will also love drink, drugs, their work, etc., more than you.)

One reason why mentorship is so popular and effective in tech might be that tech people don’t necessarily seek wider fame even when they get very rich and successful.

This is important for understanding several things:

• Paul Graham is VERY right when he urges you to keep your identity small. Fame must be instrumental and not its own goal: you should obtain as much fame and no more as is needed for you to do your job to your best ability.

• If your life’s big emotional problem is approval-seeking, fame will be like heroin for you. It’s the ultimate form of seeking approval from everyone, forever.

• Fame is a kind of fake joy but with a real sense of loss. As a result, decision making by famous people is always distorted by wanting to continue to be famous — or at least to continue to receive the dividends of fame. This can make innovation, the forming of new connections, the receiving of real feedback, and healthy life changes hard. In general, it’s a bad tradeoff because you pay and pay for it but then fame — in itself — can’t make you happy even if you manage to keep it. And it certainly won’t lead to more sharing which is a prerequisite to real joy. In many ways, fame is the ultimate social “diminishing returns”.

• There is a reason why famous people — in entertainment, etc. — mentor each other so rarely. I mentioned that the secondary persona of fame is like a third party in any relationship, interrupting the mutual information that is love. When both parties are famous, then you basically are four people in that relationship, at least, with the fame projection personas controlled by a public outside the relationship whom like a Tamagotchi you have to constantly feed. This is an agonizing way to be poly.

• If your mentee/mentor is famous, and you are an audience to their public work, you will have to consciously deal with this fact and manage your reactions to whatever they are doing in public, and with whom. Since they will be touchy about their public work, this will rarely be something you can honestly discuss with them, further driving a wedge between your realities.

• The best use of fame is as a pipeline: to get you in contact with new people, deals, places. But even in the most benevolent scenarios, when people find a way to live with their own projections and a fear of loss is not so debilitating, fame is always smoke and mirrors. The people inside and around it will get confused, bump into things, and get hurt every once in a while.

More dangerous because more immediately desirable than wealth, fame is also a kind of dark fog for those way outside the perimeters of the relationship. Mentorship has to find a way to deal with this surrounding world.

In my internal dreamworld — where it’s always a spring day and the light is soft, and there are books and flowers and embroidered cushions, and outside the window the tram’s bell tinkles on the rainy cobblestones ……. and the smell of hot chocolate from the baker’s …….. — everything is always great and people are kind and peaceful. In my complicated, important relationships, this purity is not so easy to maintain.

And so there are, beyond the many internal conflicts, also these external threats to high-stakes, hard to define relationships. Jealousy and incomprehension, cancellations and doubts, politics, the impatience of investors. When you become a mentor, when you live your life entangled in these baseline-forming friendships, at times you might feel like you have crossed into enemy lines.

It helps to remember that none of us is innocent. Most likely the situation you are in is also the result of having wanted things you saw other people around you want; your choices were also affected by those of your rivals.

The good news is, outside one’s dreamworld, even in enemy territory, choices can be mutual and so can create some stability, a foundation. Loyalty under threat: might just be the definition of community.

As a mentor, I try to be conscious of how my potential mentees see my public self, whether I think it will cause problems. I am wary of people who want me on board because they want to become famous. That is definitely not something I want to mentor people toward — I don’t think anybody should, or even could.

(The Fool knows fame is just a costume; it is not an archetype, not a character, not real.)

I’m also conscious that as a mentor I am an invitation — both challenger and leveler. Once a mentee has successfully convinced me to care about them, I am supposed to interact and participate in the creation of the relationship, in the upkeep of my information system with them. This is a delicate thing — I still need to push them, keep them on their toes so they won’t slacken their ambition, and to represent some kind of certainty, continuity in their lives. Unlike muses, mentors might differ greatly in shapes and sizes, but they are always interactive. There is a reason I call my own organization Inter—… . Otherwise my mentees would feel like they have to always chase me, that they have to always wonder, always ask, always pay to see me, always invite themselves — seeing also my public persona quite one-sidedly, they would just feel constantly uncertain and eventually unworthy. While I’m more than happy to be a tantalizing drive-by muse to some, in general I want to participate in the ethics and the joy of collaboration when possible, and to build equality.

The structure of mentorship is complex and its goals noble. And while the world may try to restrict or derail our movements, people are able to unblock each other in an outsize way and to keep each other on track. When I want something very much, I ask myself: what would be the discipline to get me there, the routine? This may sound like a tame question that only concerns the surfaces of life, but with a true Aristotelian twist, it can in fact take us deeper, to some of the core contradictions that inhibit us.

And so I think we are now ready to go to the sources of all conditions — money, access, contracts, and bodies. For that, we will need —

Rigor

Engineered scarcity is a great way to signal importance — and to notice it. Keeping something scarce often requires self-control. Noticing it requires intelligence. Self-control and intelligence are a good pairing.

Great mentors won’t impose themselves on potential mentees. It is the potential mentees who have to convince the mentors to grant them an invitation (that we call some scholarships “grants” should be a hint), and to build with them a new and in its own way stable relationship.

If you are looking for a mentor, you can right away cross out anyone from your list who looks like they want you too much. That person likely has no idea how intense the work ahead will be, or they will expect you to do all the work yourself. In Jewish tradition, when someone wants to convert the Rabbi has to turn them away three times. He has to tire out those who don’t really want it, who don’t take it seriously enough. Since the applicant has to invest so much time, energy, and resources into the attempt, they too get a chance to double-check whether this is important enough to them. (And convincing gatekeepers is of course nothing compared to how hard the actual thing you want to do will be!)

Mentors with a passive personality will be able to handle this initial “courtship” phase well: they just have to sit and wait, and see who will be brave and proactive enough to land them and get “the invite”. For them, the reciprocity-based later stages might be more challenging.

Any mentor really can only choose from applicants who apply, who try — the most active they can get at recruitment is encouraging people to apply, to try. Choosing or rejecting mentees is a crucial choice, and often there are no backsies. I too have a couple of people in my life for whom I think I’m a missed opportunity: it would have been amazing to be invited / taken seriously / collaborating when the time was right, but it might not be so easy anymore.

From the mentee’s perspective, getting involved with a mentor — in their instruction, life, and circles — is both formative and very costly: in time, in money, in other opportunities. We have seen before that it is a type of “chosen stress” that we expect to push us to become better. It is also a form of “chosen sacrifice” like any important relationship. You commit to a few people and that is all the time or brain-space you have in life.

Because you have to choose your mentors so wisely (it is what determines which determinism will follow!) and place indeed such a huge bet, I am not buying the Robert Greene style popular adage that all mentorships “must break down” at some point. I am much more of the dialectical school — I think good relationships just become something else if enough conditions change, something that is equally good if not better.

As a counterargument, I should go back to the recent dinner I attended in New York City where the discussion about mentors ensued. Talking about breakups, I — always ensuring conversations remain in the highest echelons of arts and culture — brought up Gandalf and Yoda, and how they stayed closed to their mentees, to which another attendee countered: “Yes, but Gandalf and Yoda were both fighting giant existential threats! They needed everyone!” That’s true. Since that evening, I’ve been musing just what external existential threats or illusion thereof can strengthen mentorship pairs and groups today. What does it mean to “need everyone” to today’s mentors?

The thing is I can see how internal conditions can also enable these relationships to stay together, the same way as not every teenager breaks with his parents. Some parents are able to realize when their child has grown up, and reform their relationship into a kind of adult friendship. But if I consider how my own loyalties were sealed by personal crises and through mutual investment, I realize there may be a kind of general condition that is key here that is neither fully external, nor fully internal, the same way as mastery itself is never just material or just spiritual.

“Success is succession.” — as my friend Erica says. At the end of the day, what mentors, especially when much older than their mentees, work on is replacement. And not because mentees might break with them at some point, but because sometime in the future the mentors will die, and they will want to know they have left the world in good hands, that they have made a mark on it.

*

We have explored a variety of dichotomies that structure our understanding of what mentorship is, and the many ways in which this important type of relationship, however fuzzy and always negotiated one-off, can shape the course of a life and give it a kind of dynamic ongoing order. We have talked about mentors vs mentees, communities vs individuals, good times vs bad times — short-term mentorship vs long-term friendship, practical vs spiritual formation.

In this next section we will explore another interesting pair of contradictions, something I find a lot of fun. The Fool here feels very much at home: we’re back in archetypal territory.

And no, we won’t drag out the whole chessboard to illustrate our point, but two figures must be discussed right away, and why they matter when we talk about guardianship and guidance:

The King and the Priest.

First of all, this simple pairing shows just how much mentorship is a form of public service. Mentors — from bosses to professors, from incubator leaders to older relatives — tend to have far more mentees in their lives than how many mentors the mentees will have. (Outside close collaborations or friendships, the way mentees in the end can “pay back” their mentors is really only by paying it forward, and starting to mentor new entrants of their own.)

Leaning into one’s archetype has a huge practical value for a mentor. It’s useful for structuring interactions, managing expectations — it simplifies things. But even great mentors often have no idea whether they are Kings or Priests. People simply have a blindspot about this: it is hard to intuit one’s own archetype. You could say that all job titles, horoscopes, and personality tests are seeking to fill in this gap. This is about — as my friend and Interintellect co-conspirator Violeta Kristof would say — “What would Zosima whisper to you?” What is something that everybody who knows you knows about you, but is not readily visible to you?

Before I would explain to you this dichotomy, we need to talk a little bit about permission.

In business literature women, minorities, young entrants — in fact any entrant — are encouraged to “not ask for permission”. JUST DO IT. I think this is total nonsense. Of course, you need permission to do anything in society! Have you ever tried to walk out of a store with something without paying? Most things in life people just can’t do without permission, either legally or psychologically.

I’m not just talking about the obvious examples of contracts, permits, certificates, consent, and lease agreements — although even your most hipster crypto wallet will want to verify you. I’m talking about the fact that it is a psychological trait of human beings to not be able to do much in life unless someone else has granted them permission.

Permission-giving is a very, very important role in society we assign or usurp in a variety of ways. From like buttons to “sanity checks” with friends, from a smiley nod to finally being invited to that offsite, people give each other’s desires permission in a gazillion ways, all the time. In fact some people’s main job in life is to give permission! (Emily Oster — hello? Donald Trump…) Compare your before/after stress levels the next time you want to expense something to your accountant via your LLC, show up uninvited to a talk, or eat sushi while pregnant, and what you needed to be told to feel you can.

Sure, the ability to give your own self permission can be a superpower. But the core of human ambition is always social, you want to do something with / to / against other people. And so permission — in professional settings too — is a kind of guarantee that if you do this or that, people will still want to be around you after. That they’ll want to be friends, that they’ll want your ideas, that they’ll want to work with you.

We’ve looked at how in mentorship, there is always a question, mutually asked. When we consider just how thoroughly mentors are tasked with permission-giving (they are an invitation) we understand that in that mutual question, there is always a “Please.”

Please let me in / let me play / … … — The Infinite Game is an agreement. It’s somebody, at some point, saying “yes”. You can. You can stay. You can try. Please don’t let me down.

Of course — and thank God — mentors can’t do even the best mentee’s job for them. But they can give the mentees permission to do it themselves. And while doing so, mentors always wrestle with their doubt: Would this person do the thing even if I hadn’t given them permission?

Whether a mentor is a King or a Priest will determine what kind of permission they can give, and what kind of permission people will demand from them. This dichotomy will also show you why the word “gatekeeper” is not always so useful in understanding these processes.

(1) Kings

Mentors who are Kings make zero-to-one decisions over the existence of projects: they give fundamental resources — investment, job commissions, degrees, film or book deals, an SNL contract — that will enable a thing that otherwise would not exist to exist.

As in our medieval towns, where Kings gave title, land, and various liberties writ down in decrees, most “King mentors” these days throw around money on types of projects and people they want to see more of in the world.

It is a common misconception that a King mentor will then also be somehow involved in one’s project. A famous conundrum in Silicon Valley and environs is when some famous investor wires a founder — to the founder: a lot of — money, but then never replies to any email ever again. (This happens shockingly often.)

Unless you make friends, which is usually completely independent from the money or resources previously given, there is little opportunity to hang out with Kings. And that is probably fine: their time really is best spent splashing around value where they see fit, and then move on to someone else in need of permission.

While their interaction can be as light, Kings are not like muses: they are mentors. Kings do want to use what you make, they do want a stake, you are in some ways their own ethical self-expression (“I made this thing/person happen.”); they do provide stability (mostly money, but also sometimes advice, contacts) in exchange for a hope in a better future. They cannot be invoked, you have to convince them. Once you have, their involvement with you will not be accidental or a random favor; they do in their own way care.

There are downsides to being King. One is that Kings can really reign over the life and death of projects and careers, and this can make them feel they’re above or outside society. Kings are quite rare even in the era of crypto-billionaire philanthropy, and so there is a loneliness that comes with their decision-making, and a difficulty of trusting friends and advisors, let alone other Kings. The great fear of the King is that he will be duped or scammed. And it is true that most people want to take something from the King: money, status, a name to drop. Managing these resources and keeping people guessing are talents good Kings have or develop.

The great hope of the King is that he is not “just” a king — but also someone to love like a “regular guy/girl who likes to work out” or a great thinker, or a very charitable person. A lot of Kings want to be a little bit like Priests.

Some Kings of course have successful secondary areas of operation, or can be notable theorists of their field or of society. A great King is on a speaking tour right now about Satan.

(2) Priests

One doesn’t have to go full Faust, though, when seeking a good deal or someone to broker it.

Priests are a very different flavor of mentor, giving a very different kind of permission. If you are a Priest, you may in some cases be giving zero-to-one resources to mentees — but your main function and M.O. will still be about something else.

The Priests — as in our medieval town — are tasked with being present during the great life transitions of mentees and providing practical and spiritual support. One of the great transitions is of course entering the mentorship itself — whether this is an academic program, a grant, an internship. But in the case of a Priest, that is just the beginning, and in many ways the least important phase of the partnership.

The type of permission a Priest gives is the confirmation of the transition as real and legitimate. Especially in our fuzzy times, when we work outside traditional institutional boundaries, these forms of “blessings” are of absolute psychological necessity.

Good mentors, of course, don’t want to interfere or influence mentees badly or in a bad moment and risk doing harm, and so — unlike the medieval Priests who were summoned for obvious births and deaths — this form of mentorship will require a lot of tact, good habits, and good communication.

Using the Priest archetype also helps us see that these mentors don’t themselves preside over life and death itself. They are professional witnesses instead, of the suffering and successes of others. The Priests preside over rites of passage — between life or death, or one life and the next — and their presence confirms those changes have happened.

The downside of being a “Priest mentor” is that Priests will have a lot of information about other people. This is both a mental and emotional burden to bear, and — paradoxically — having too much information about people can make later decision-making about them more difficult, not less (How talented is somebody you have seen at their most untalented? Kings only see our A-game, Priests see everything.)

While Kings have undeniable resources to impart with, Priests gain their legitimacy from — us. We give it to them. And so the relationship between Priest mentors and their mentees is always less … shall we say “violent”? Priests didn’t take their power, we gave it to them. We appointed or at least accepted them as intermediaries between ourselves and some higher aim, our better selves. And so these relationships always, already, start in implicit agreement, they’re by default much more equal. (I’ve always seen American politicians — and great standup comedians — as being the “Preacher” archetype, and maybe this is indeed where the Tocquevillian harmony between elective democracy and religion is the most archetypically obvious.)

It is very hard to tell whether you are a King or a Priest as a mentor — because as a King you want to be more like a Priest and so you will develop some priestly activities and behaviors, and because as a Priest you might be distributing some resources yourself. But other people around you will know which type of authority you are immediately, they can sense it, they respond to it... Then, when people don’t get what they came for, there might be disappointments, so it is always good to give this question some thought.

A great mentor I know recently told me when I congratulated him on a new, exceptional mentee: “I am just guarding the exit.” And I thought, well, that is just not true… Because I distinctly remembered how five years ago he was asked to join the beginning of an Interintellect salon hosted by a then up-and-coming female scientist — to be a witness. To confirm, with his presence, that some change had taken place, that she was now a public intellectual to listen to. There was no external reason for this confirmation to be needed: the room was full, there were newcomers and well-known people who all loved her and came for her. But it was the mentor who had to see her, the act of seeing confirmed her transition — and I was a witness to this witnessing! — otherwise the transition would not have felt complete, indeed it would not have happened. And that is not a one-off act of gatekeeping, but a continuous testimony of Bildung. (I know we always come back to Hegel — here: how recognition by another person moves individual self-consciousness to the next level — but this is how it is.)

Priests are terrified people will drag them into their lives against their will. I think this fear is mostly unwarranted. While I don’t mentor people officially outside my own mentoring program, in Interintellect, as the leader, I often act as a Priest. I am summoned for life transitions. I have more information about people than I ask for. It is a recurring source of disappointment when a salon host secretly hopes I would turn up for their salon, and I don’t. (Often they don’t tell me; they want to see if I will do it by myself.) And still, as in a real clan, while I might be sent drafts or be called in a crisis, most people who think of me as their mentor take pride in delineating a life where they don’t need my permission anymore, which is solely theirs. And, funnily, very often I’ll be the last person to find out two members or hosts in Interintellect are dating, collaborating, or have just had a child together. For me, as long as I know about problems first, this is fine.

And sure, there might be some innovative marriages that make daily use of their wedding officiant, but most people prefer to leave the Priest at church, and only call upon him for christenings and deaths, or during illness or marital problems. And so it is with Priest mentors, although respecting their worries and boundaries is probably a good idea.

*

After discussing all these circumstantial dichotomies influencing how mentorship works and what it can achieve, now we will address perhaps the most important human polarity, that between men and women.

Obviously, there is a LOT going on between men and women, in mentorship and anywhere else, and so even trying to scratch the surface is an impossible undertaking.

So to give this some contour, I am not going to talk about some of these — multiple book deals worthy —complications…

• The media portrayal of male and female mentors

• Whether in a masculine field like tech a mentee is better off with a male mentor vs a female one

• Cultural differences

• That both men and women have both feminine and masculine traits that can react to each other in a variety of combinations that have nothing to do with chromosomes

• Whether the man or the woman or both being parents affects their mentoring behavior; whether the sex of their child/ren matters

• Gay men and women, vs straight, whether sexual orientation matters

• When couples collaborate in a mentorship-like way, whether gay or straight

• How it used to be “back then” vs how it is supposed to be now

• The cases where mentors and mentees hook up

• About the patriarchy (sorry)

Instead what I’d like to do is a very cursory comparison of same-sex vs man/woman mentoring duos, because I think there is something very important there.

(1) Same-sex mentorship

Women in tech like to complain that most mentorship in our field is between men and men. All the podcasts, all the famous mentoring duos, all the infamous CEOs… Publicly too, men clearly promote each other more, often as a way to make themselves look better, more “in the know”. Despite many individual male players’ laudable efforts, the game theory simply does not benefit female outliers, the same way as some other fields — like American literary fiction — are female-led and imbalanced against men.

In response, some women turn to all-female mentoring groups, which to some can be an empowering experience, although I am personally always careful with attempts to create parallel realities. (There is a reason why my own mentorship program is called “The GrownUp Table”. That is where you want to sit.) I am — always and forever — hopeful that men and women can work it out. I believe good mentorship can be an important vehicle for that.

Working it out starts with an understanding that in the clan-like, primitive yet spiritual world that is mentorship, both the purpose and the underlying structure of same-sex vs man/woman setups are very different. There might be rare exceptions to this, but people — in any situation — remain people.

In a same-sex mentoring duo, which in my world is mainly man-to-man, the product of the creative partnership is the mentee. The older or more experienced person will build a relationship with the entrant that resembles a parental or elder sibling bond. Together, mentor and mentee create an increasingly better, more maturely expressed version of the mentee, and this growth in confidence and mastery benefits both parties. The mentor can be proud of his creation — and perhaps happy for a new friend — while the mentee can see themselves develop in the desired shape of the role model, the master.

The upside of same-sex mentorship is legibility. The other person is not so much Other: there is a mutual sameness which makes communication and guidance easier. Paradoxically, however, similarity also magnifies the differences between the two people (age, location, status). And so the shadow of the same-sex setup is the potential for rivalry and hatred. Being of the same sex but further apart in age tends to have a positive effect on male-male mentorships, age being a neutral differentiator.

But even when the darker emotions are kept at bay, sameness always threatens identity. To this, most commonly, the mentee might respond with some kind of revolt. A need to redefine boundaries, a need for divergence, a need to “show it”. The mentor has multiple jobs here: to provide the baseline and the standards, to not feel threatened by the growing expertise of the mentee, to manage disagreements if they arise, and in the less fortunate cases, if the bond cannot survive the tests of rebellion, to let the younger person go.

Same-sex mentorships, or even employee-boss relationships, tap into childhood memories and previous thwarted ambitions quite mercilessly. “I have become everyone’s absentee father,” wrote Mike Ovitz about his male employees in a frustrated moment. I too have fought the shadows of my female employees’ mothers in more than one situation, an instance of transference that clinical psychologists are trained for but that most other people, however professionally accomplished in their fields, are not.

And if the older person projects too much of their own “younger self” onto their protégé, the younger person’s self-distancing might be seen as outrageous, a betrayal. One more reason to build mentorship as a form of friendship, where really the ultimate goal is reaching a more equal state of collaboration where these potential former traumas and current expectations can be leveled.

(2) Man/woman mentorship

Despite the easy horrors of the Freudian world model, most man/woman mentorships are neither incestuous nor parental. They are just what they are: a relationship between a man and a woman. The good news is that this setup is naturally more equal: men and women are Other to each other, both strangely attractive and in most ways illegible. Their differences are so great that it weakens even the most forbidding hierarchy — a bit like if two aliens were meeting from different planets and trying to establish each other’s social status back home.

Unknown is equal to unknown — regardless of net worth, compute, or cryonics. I do respect my male seniors but not in the same way and not for the same reasons why a male mentee would. When men and women meet, they always break rank, they always upset the Order. Women might glance wistfully at the mobility implied in any man-man apprenticeship, but it is we who trigger much greater transgression.

But this intellectual equality — the mutual curiosities of minds at play — must not distract from the fact that mentorships, like all other important relationships, are played out on a wider stage, in society, where outcome does depend on access, and where women almost always start with a handicap.

When the mentee is a young woman, this imbalance can be extremely challenging — if not altogether discouraging of association — and something an older male mentor must at all times take into consideration (because the young woman can’t do too much about it). Mentoring a young woman must always include the part where she is taught strategies of dealing with this imbalance.

When the mentor is an older woman and the mentee a younger man — unless the female mentor deliberately wants to be seen as maternal and the mentee is on board with that — the relationship will be more formal than in male mentor <> female mentee setups. This is because the way the younger man can avoid looking like he’s somehow sexualizing the relationship (which of course he is) is by showing a respect so rigid to the woman at all times that it would entrance even Confucius. In my experience this can be loosened up a bit once a friendship element is added to the relationship; when the female mentor makes a deliberate effort to show communality and camaraderie. That said, younger men sometimes “practice” their social graces on their female mentors, and I think there should be a place in life for such rehearsals. (And there aren’t many.)

If younger men are afraid of sinful thoughts then younger women are just afraid, period. It is a sad fact of society and perhaps our biology that hyper-intelligent and super-talented young women are always a thousand times more terrified and less confident than the boys in the same age group, even though the boys are quite often, at that age, less competent than the girls. An older male mentor therefore has to deal with both this internal condition in a young woman and the external conditions of a world that dismisses her intellect and achievements while she may not yet have the skills to fight back. Being closer in age or life-stage has a big positive effect on mixed-sex pairings whether standalone or within a clan-like group.

Unlike in same-sex setups, in a successful mixed-sex pairing the creation is never the mentee. A man/woman relationship is by default creative, generative — fertile. And so the creation that is being created here together is always a third thing, outside the two people.

In more casual cases, the third thing can be just the relationship itself, in a dialectical way. In more elaborate, more mature collaboration setups, the man and the woman will create work together.

When the mentee is female and collaboration for some reason does not happen, I think that is hard on the relationship, and especially painful for the woman, as if the relationship was infertile (“You don’t like me enough?”), or somehow not blessed. To put it bluntly, men and women have to regularly make work-babies, or else there will be problems, and eventually the woman will leave. And likely go find someone else who will be productive with her.

The powerful inspiration that is sparked between men and women is where a lot of societal stresses, industry injustices, and past paranoias can simply … dissolve. In this realm of transformation and vulnerability, often one person can rebalance a lifetime of distrust.

Around the Shabbat table, where men and women gather to create their future, we call every man every great man before and after, and every woman every great woman before and after. And so it is in encounters of talent, excellence, and creativity where each of us gets a new chance to represent and realign the interests of our sexes and make something new together, something that never existed before, outside ourselves.

When we talk about a meeting of the practical and the spiritual, the shared creation of a future that men and women are capable of together is not so bad an example.

Awe

It is of endless annoyance to the philosopher how the most important things in life prefer to elude comprehension. You take the finer phenomena of existence and try to describe them, and it feels like you’re attacking a bundle of bluets with a hatchet. (Is this why composers happened?) You try to pin words on good things and they just slip out, disappear… JOY is a good example: while sadness can be explained for hours and hours (and hours and hours), happiness likes to not even be mentioned. How polite!

And still, there is no joy without the “Superior Man” frequenting his friends for discussion and practice. We need to talk! The mastery of the hands and soul requests cultivation. Culture. Whatever is hard to grasp or put into words by myself, in exchange — the two lakes! — might become obvious. It gets permission.

By now you might have noticed that, when in doubt, I like to find a lucrative contradiction, and massage it until it yields some kind of a solution. Just look at my company: Interintellect. It is — as my friends call it — “applied philosophy”. An oxymoron if I’ve ever seen one! And yet, something caught between those contrasting forces keeps churning out gold. It blurts out truths! Somehow it works despite everything.

The first idea of Interintellect came to me in 2014, when I was a postgrad student at Goldsmiths in London. I’d always been both an artist and a person who can’t help building and organizing things, and it bothered me to see how unsupported the talent around me was. So I built a framework where talent could support each other, via a matching marketplace —

This idea was called “Lightclock” (because I was already great at giving my creations catchy names). The light clock is a thought experiment proposed by Einstein to visualize time dilation. It features a photon bouncing between two mirrors in space, which in certain visualizations reminded me of the computer game Pong. It was a visual symbol of mutuality, of conversation. Back — and forth. Lakes of light.

Then a lot of bad things happened in my life which threw me off course, and I didn’t go back to being able to build anything at all until the fall of 2016. I’m specifying this date because I think it matters when a person enters an industry, what the conditions are like at the time. It will determine the entrant’s baseline as well as their starting-pack community.

I had been in tech on and off since 2010, but it was a side job for me, a pastime. In late 2016 it became clear that it would become my primary career. There were things about tech that came as a total revelation to me. It felt less political (lol), more meritocratic, less sexist (still!), more objective in its judgment, and much, much less zero-sum than the worlds of art, media, and academia that I lived in until then.

I entered at a time when Marc Andreessen ruled a platform called Twitter. We were discussing Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence. Sam Altman re-announced “E Pur Si Muove”. Zuckerberg was dragged in front of Congress. The IDW was nascent. Jordan Peterson was controversial but mostly sane. When you operate outside traditional institutions, cohorts matter. And so in my “graduating class” were people like Amjad Masad and Packy McCormick (both now investors in Interintellect). Jim O’Shaughnessy’s podcast was up and coming (another investor in my company). Quillette was up and coming. Jason Crawford was figuring out what to do with this progress thing… David Perell was amassing followers. Julia Galef posted regularly. Sahil Lavingia kept surprising people. Hip City Reg distanced himself from the race discourse. Maria Salamanca started helping immigrant founders in new ways.

In my circles, people talked a lot about aspiration. Tyler and Michael Nielsen declared the great ROI of raising other people’s ambition. Agnes Callard wrote repeatedly about it. I remain deeply convinced they are correct. In fact, I feel like the whole Girardian thesis breaks down in the question of aspiration, this more or less inexplicable drive inside individuals which I think resists mimesis. Sure, you might copy other people’s way of being ambitious, but the drive itself — what level of ambition you wake up with every morning — seems totally innate to me, an internal condition, maybe the internal condition of humans.

I think about this maybe more than other people because it is a mystery to me how my own personal ambition could avoid being broken, no matter what happened or how much anybody tried. And how that whole thing works... The human will. And where it comes from. I just don’t know! This makes me quite certain no one else knows either.

People sometimes ask if Interintellect is a talent development program. If it is about aspiration. And I always pause because… Sure, in some sense it is. On our platform, event hosts hone their skills, grow their reputations, their income.

But I am finding myself much more fascinated these days by inspiration. The mysterious ways in which people move and affect each other. Why somebody ends up not being a stranger. Why they speak to you and you can hear it and you want to respond.

You can aspire to anything you want in this life. If no one is inspiring you, your lake will run dry.

Inspiration > Aspiration

Aspiration, in my personal experience, might aim for the best of things, and still it comes from a dark, small, ugly place. There are hurt teenagers huddling in there, interns who were passed over for the job. There are dirty misunderstandings broiling in there, breakups, lost games, petty remarks, fears of an Apocalypse, and siblings who outperformed you at school. In aspiration there is always encoded a deprivation, a despair, an inability to deal with crises head-on. “I need to do this to feel like a person…” Nobody aspires from a happy place.

Inspiration throws the light on us. It catches us by surprise through another person’s mind, their brilliance, their presence. To our shock, they can see us too, and they don’t turn away. If aspiration is the long tail of the past, then inspiration insists on the present and sees us capable of a future. In inspiration, we learn mutuality, and that we’re not so bad at all. It is being a person to a person as default whole.

Aspiration is audacious because it crosses a boundary — in my aspiration I go further inside or from myself, I cross my own line. Not stopped by anyone, I can end up doing great harm, violence to myself.

Inspiration is audacious because it breaks someone else’s boundaries — it dares to come closer to another and cause change. Since the license is mutual, the crossings can be more tentative, more exploratory, more measured. In inspiration, no one has to hurt themselves or the other.

In mentorship, a special type of mutual inspiration, we seek formative, chosen suffering to become better — and we find betterment not in suffering but in JOY. I wonder if it is inspiration that takes us from one to the other.

Whatever heights I might reach through my aspiration, I am constantly put back into my place by the sheer fact of my not understanding the Other. I am taught, again and again, not that I know nothing, but that I know no one. And in inspiration, I can accept this. Inspiration is mutual ignorance and mutual learning. Hope.

We might assume that from this total illegibility of other people emanates all human belief in God. From this mystery comes all art as a way of saying: I don’t understand, but I want to! Here is my take —

Being of the same cohort, being loyal to the same mentors, honoring our clan-like arrangements — these things help solve the contradictions of inspiration. The mystery of mutual affection. In the book The Dawn of Everything, Wengrow and Graeber discover that the average human can hold a thought in their brain for about seven seconds. When in conversation with another person: indefinitely. Every major relationship is thus a major, multi-decade conversation. We face each other and keep asking each other the same question. A life spent asking is a life not wasted.

Inspiration between individuals is as much more interesting than aspiration as there are possible combinations between aspiring individuals. These inspired combinations are a billion times more unique than any individual genius could be. And so I take my contradictions and create these loops so something more refined, more original can pop out. Maybe what we call “ethics” is just these loops, and a system that can keep them safe and running.

Inspiration is where our joy starts and where it returns. When I think connection + curation, I think: a good life.

*

During our dinner, a friend asked: Could an LLM be her mentor? And I started wondering about the role of imagination here, of solitary inquiry, unmet expectation.

Zora Neale Hurston wasn’t the only one to have realized her mentor may not have been as active at the whole mentoring thing as she had imagined. Given the confusions around the category and the general intellectual complexities involved, some groups or duos indeed may never be able to openly decide if they are mentorship or not. I believe there are many of us milling about being at least partly mystified who our mentors are and whom do we mentor. For public profile mentors and mentees, it can be even harder to tell.

The most personally harrowing econ paper I have ever read found that women tend to “overestimate the amount of altruism shown toward them”, even in the most intimate settings like families. I found it harrowing because it touched upon a real problem: that in male-first environments such as my job, women have to negotiate unique deals with people and try to shut out the rest of the world in order to get anything done, to build a real relationship — but in the real world out there things continue to unfold in their usual proportions. And so we can see that we are not really a part of it, never really inside. (And I do get it, men are just so, so much easier to help, and to help at scale — and the market wants to specialize.) And so I think in some fundamental way women can never really be sure. We never know if we’re just imagining the goodness or kindness of somebody, or if it’s real. And from our inquietude theoretical systems emerge that can then be helpful for everyone.

One way to be sure would of course be building one’s own separate reality, one’s own clan and law, and giving up on the joys of bridge-crossing collaboration with Others. But that’s more like an evasion of the problem than solving it. Like I said, parallel world-building is always a questionable undertaking. It never answers the original question.

Agnes in her book Open Socrates — an exploration of the ethical system that is conversation — jokes that no matter how detailed her imaginary dialogues with her husband are, when she actually asks him the same questions in real life, he always says something unexpected that she didn’t see coming, something that she couldn’t have imagined. And so I too wonder if I would be satisfied with just imaginary conversations. Imaginary mentors. Imaginary advice. If my lake would be just fine, if it would replenish itself… If, like when I was a troubled young woman, I could just flee to the library, and return to a more solitary, more one-sided life, maybe invoke some meh muse... There would be less pain, less uncertainty, less vulnerability for sure. Less fear of being deceived, or feeling like one can’t tell.

Then I remember the JOY.

You know, I too used to think it was suffering that made people better, but now I am not so sure. Maybe the poets lied. I think the Fool knew.

I’ve come to think it is happiness that makes us better — we have to evolve and stand up to the task of never losing it. In joy, the contradictions and differences somehow evaporate and then we have to deal with …. not being divided by anything. It is the most contrarian of all knowledge. That inspiration runs both ways and there is nothing there to stop it. That it can turn into … anything.

And so I stand my ground day after day, and try to contain it all. Imaginary or not — muses and mentors. I am accepting the fact that the highest ROI in fact is having people in one’s life whom one never ever want to let down. Ever.

I think this is what good mentorship does, to both mentors and mentees. Like all great friendships it shouldn’t work, but it does.

Our mother is dead. Her hearse mustn’t be led to some pop song.”

(Gyula Illyés: Bartók)

Last year I came to understand something I had never before even considered. I had lost my father, and for the first time in my life I suddenly craved distinctive clothing. Black veil. The ashes. I suddenly realized why people in most cultures used to — or still — wear differentiating colors to signal that they are in mourning. That this person here clad in black or in white is in an altered state, is in a different space, temporarily tethered to the dead, dangling mid-realm, untouchable. I wanted to wear black but in New York what difference would it have made? (One more neurotic blonde in black, quoi de neuf?) I wanted people to know that I couldn’t be expected to be fun for a while. That I was closed for business.

When a woman is pregnant or she’s just had a baby, it is so clear to all, so visible: her situation has changed, she’s in a new place, adjusting. We all know she needs courtesy, kindness. But dying is negative space, it is something lacking, not there, and thus by default invisible. People don’t know because you can’t tell them. Because how? That lingua franca of symbols is gone. I craved to be able to demand respectful distance from others, to be left alone, or approached gently, for it to be OK, to be allowed to. My dead was offended, through my person, when I wasn’t. All the dead were somehow disturbed. I wanted to signal that I was open to be with others who had also lost loved ones. That I could now be shared that way among them like a thing, that I was now part of that story. I wanted people to know that if they loved me, now was the time to show.

Instead I hosted festivals and events, and relocated to America. I cried to a friend over lunch by mistake, and I never ever saw her again. I started crying at home alone. I ran my company, led my team, oversaw our budget, and bit by bit grew the prestige that widens doors for startups like mine. I went to DC and SF and Boston and Austin and Miami and San Diego and to Yale, and then all over again. I stressed every day about money and visa, and access and leases, and travel and health. To get press. To be able to pay. To stay. I struggled to sleep. I smoked and I drank, and I cried and I walked, and I couldn’t write my book and I felt ashamed. I worked a lot. I complained a lot. I cried so much, and so deeply and unstoppably, that eventually my eyelids developed an allergy. I reached out to the one person who meant security and stability to me — who originally made me come to America — and I was rejected, hands washed, and designated to be some kind of party entertainment. So I entertained. I always entertain. I cried some more. I felt like my life was a complete joke, that I was a painted clown, a fool, the Verdi singer who sings her aria with the knife sticking out of her chest. I started living with a broken heart as an unofficial disability. I briefly considered dying, or whether I was already dead. I hoped love would win. Somehow. That it must win. Right? Because people are good. I knew I was becoming stronger but I did not like the person I was becoming. I don’t know this new person that 2024 made me.

Grief and America are very similar places, they change your body, your biochemistry, your physiognomy. My hair is different. I smell different. Grief took the tastes from my mouth, made the corners of my lips pull down, made my eyes sad. America gives me intellectual vigor, pleasures, friends, adventures, and pride, but also true terror for the first time in my life, abject fear, exposure, loneliness, justified feelings of disposability and replaceability, a walls-wrecking desire for safety that I feel at all times in my sinews and bones and muscles and joints, and it is not going away, I wonder what could ever make it. That grip around the throat that it’s hard to catch your breath.

I travel with my father’s bracelets, the chain he always wore, a gift from my grandmother; I keep them in my New York apartment. America is harder than grief even in a family like ours. I hadn’t spoken to my father for years before he died, for good reasons I have discussed elsewhere, and only found out by accident that he was dying so I could rush back just in time to Budapest and see him curled up in a coma.

Nobody tells you the pity you will feel when your parents become babies. Beep, beep the monitor says hanging over your father in a diaper. The pity, and the smallness, and the care, when you realize that you’re now an orphan but that he was too. Little orphans. Poor him! Poor baby! … Poor me! … Poor us! He was just as rejected, just as cruel. Cutting, and hurting, and abandoning all of his life, and for what? We all kill our parents. All parents eat their children. Animals growl at each other across the fence. You look at the flailing heartbeat on the screen, the swollen head on the hard hospital pillow, the swollen head full of blood. There goes my DNA! One day this will be me and I don’t even have a forgiving, soft-hearted, gullible daughter to fly over and stand there like an idiot and caress my wet forehead, to recognize my swollen fingers, and to weep.

You walk in there like a ghost on a floor full of soon-to-be ghosts, tubes in mouths like fish on hooks waiting to be chopped up and put in the oven — you’re wearing the distinctive clothing of disgust: the plastic masks, the scrubs. The famous doctor’s hand on the small of my back, up my arm, what can I say in here, in his Necropolis, to this necrophiliac, what crazy woman would object to what exactly now, what here in front of all these nurses? This is why this guy has this job, this is why he wanted it, I conclude, and my little girl brain thinks Daddy can’t even come and help me now (!), because I always imagined him like that, you know, that he would come running and defend me, and I remind myself where I am, and that when my Dad still could he tried to sell me off to an 80-year-old friend of his to finance my London studies. Like I did back then, I step away from the doctor and we both pretend that nothing is happening. And a year, and all that money and time and paperwork and learning and improving and stressing and fundraising and world-building and mountains-moving and all that work work work work work work work work work work work later, I sit at a party in America, my job seems to be to just sit there, be pretty I guess (I’m not even that pretty), and I wonder what the hell?, if this is Hell, what have I done. Whom have I trusted. Why have I come. Should I have come.

I am being trained and groomed for what is allowed to say. Don’t people know I can’t be put back into my place because I don’t have a place?

I can’t write this properly, I am so sorry, grief is nonlinear, it’s all a staccato in my head, an arpeggio, an Armageddon. I am fine and then I am not fine, I go and cry in the toilet of this airplane. Do other people cry over me on airplanes the way I do? Do other people love? Do other people care? Do other people grieve? If I died, would they mourn me and long for black attire? Maybe I’ll be able to write about this better in a few decades, but by then I’ll be grieving for even more people, and what will happen to me anyway when they’re all gone?

Ondaatje wrote: “We are the real countries.” Show me a better sentence. I’ll wait. I am always waiting. The map feels surreal now, just blotches underneath me, spacetime is broken, I leave, I go back, time stops in one place and speeds up in another. My face grows older and bitter. I worry I wear my sorrows in my face. My mind is always moving, faster than these vehicles, faster than my mercy; it’s always not just exploring but imploring, the tongue searching for where you bit your lip. And I keep coming back to the same thought, the certainty, that somehow nothing else matters. It is not nihilism, I think it’s my morality.

Only friends can assuage your grief and give you America. Only friendship can. Everything else is prostitution, cold fears and colder fingers, Selektion, the Kingdom of the Dead. We will not remember the years and the flights, you know, the lies and the hopes and the waiting. We will only remember the people and who they made us.

Every mind is like a shark…”

Thresholds

It is easier to change the culture of an entire country than it is to change the culture of one family. The mysterious differences between how people function in public versus in private have always fascinated me. Growing up during the last years of communism in Eastern Europe and its aftermath, I noticed early people’s mistaken assumption that they can restrict their political freedoms and truths to their homes — where you can speak more or less openly among trusted relatives and friends — and perform the empty motions of socialism and later faux-democracy out in the public square, rituals that nobody seriously believes in. (For a good primer on how common knowledge is destroyed or prevented under oppressive political systems, you can start with Scott Aaronson or Václav Havel himself. I also wrote about this some years ago in more detail.)

A place where people negotiate their private and public truths, to increase the legibility of their values as a society and their sense of integrity as individuals, is the ill-defined “semi-public” or “third” space: the realm that is not exactly public and accessible to all, not exactly a place of wider coordination — think voting, demonstrations, market exchange — but certainly more public than one’s home, startup office, and marital bed. On front porches and in university corridors, on church steps and at sports games, at conferences and during opera intermissions people gather to discuss their reality. The more informedly and fearlessly they can do this, the more representative and free their government will be, being an entity charged with managing reality according to the people’s values and preferences. There in fact can be no social reality or social response to physical reality without people discussing it, and then charging an entity with its management.

In healthy democracies, most social change happens in these points of crossing. This is where we find out if a public policy is actually useful or even adopted by the real individuals who compose society, and also where whatever half-formed preference a company, a family, or a couple might come up with in private can be tested against and compared to what other people are saying and doing. Dictatorships like to absorb the semi-public spaces first. From universities to message boards, from cultural centers to benches in the park, third-space conversations go quiet, merge, disappear, and adopt new, more politically aligned tones wherever a community is not truly free to assemble and discuss what’s on its mind.

When the semi-public spaces disappear, the language of politics becomes self-contained and self-fulfilling, while the actual people retreat into their homes and businesses with their private notions that now cannot be shared in partnership or competition with the other hubs. When the hubs are so severed from one another, our collective life is over. When the hubs are so severed we start resembling the hovels of serfs paying taxes to the faraway tsar whose decisions have nothing to do with us and which we can no longer influence anyway. When the communication network of the hubs is severed, Tocqueville’s America is gone.

In my first piece in this new Substack essay series American Innocence, I wrote about how mathematical analysis of historical escalations into autocracy or other irreversible outcomes show that people, ever busy with our daily problems and preoccupations, tend to conclude too early that it’s too late and nothing can be done. When I started Interintellect in 2019, as an immigrant from illiberal Hungary and an unwilling observer of Brexit in the UK where I was living, I was driven by the definite ambition to help rebuild and maintain a semi-public space that is accessible globally, that is unsullied by partisan politics, and where people can continue to discuss what’s on their minds — ideas both public and private — come what may.

To some degree, I think my project has been successful: a case has been made for a space for challenging but friendly discussion between citizens, available at all times. We have seen hosts and attendees flourish, grow into intellectually proactive adults, academics, writers, founders, start families often with people they’ve met in Interintellect, create artistic organizations, move across the globe to live closer to each other, etc. But within my private logic, I remain dissatisfied with my own system, the one I built 2016-2019. It seems to me that there are other democratic and undemocratic forces operating under our notions of public and private. Recently, my friend looked into the matter from the point of view of how far and fast memes can spread. wrote about the hidden aspects of cities — the secret vaults, the exclusive clubs, the arenas blocked from pedestrian view. Last year, subjected New York City to the same analysis: a place of Left-talking elites and invisible service sector workers literally catering to them, another public/private division line in sense-making.

In this piece I will attempt to outline my own results so far, which in many ways differ from theirs. Please note that a lot of the things I have arrived at directly contradict my personal values or preferences, which is also why I suspect much of this is true.

I offer my investigation up for discussion here — be your comments public or private.

***

When a political system wants you to leave it alone and not cause too much trouble, you will be encouraged — through threats of violence, labyrinthine procedural language and laws nobody understands, an impotent and propagandistic media you stop believing, and abundantly available isolating entertainment that keeps you in a state of permanent brain rot — to … well … leave that political system alone.

You will suddenly decide, as if spontaneously, for your safety or for your pleasure, to return to your own household and to stay there, and to just literally mind your own business.

The moment when you do this, the political system that wanted you to do this has won. Now it no longer has to fight you, convince you, govern you. During communism in Hungary, or amid the overreaches of the Orbán regime today, people in educated, outgoing Budapest took and take it for granted that things could not be otherwise. The received wisdom is that one should let “those in power” do their thing — steal, lie, shadow-box — while normal people try to get on: the office needs new printers, the kids need new braces, there are plays and concerts to see, and the hot girl needs to be cleverly asked out so she can’t say no. When one has such little apparent effect on policy making, and when any provocation might prompt destructive reactions from those in power, why would a legally reasonable person ever get involved?

Once people are checked out this way, it is very, very hard to get checked back in again. When people are checked out, they forget the recent time when their being checked out was not the “obvious” state of things. To stay with the previous example, in Hungary, just in the late 2000s there were major demonstrations, even riots, that transformed the system of governance. Nothing about the current situation is “Lindy”, nothing is long-established and meant to stay. And even if it was, we could argue that the road to serfdom does not need to be walked down willingly.

As in my previous essay, I asked GPT 5 to use my model if it can, and elaborate:

My query: “Use a formula of threshold dynamics to explain the following phenomena:

An increasingly autocratic system encourages - through threats of violence, labyrinthine procedural language and laws, an impotent and propagandistic media, and abundant available personal entertainment - the population to become politically passive, and retreat into their private lives.

If you can use this system, describe instead of this retreat what counterforce would be necessary for the threshold dynamics to reach a critical point, and the regime to realistically change:”

GPT 5’s response:

(I am aware that building on Schelling and Granovetter, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called The Tipping Point about this, but I have not read it. Consider also Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann’s work on the “spiral of silence”, and Timur Kuran’s “element of surprise” in collective change.)

In short, the threshold is real. When in doubt, do not “make political retreat a rational equilibrium”. Reversing something is always much harder than avoiding it.

I think Timothy Snyder is quite wrong when he suggests you just “build a private life” against tyranny — even if his counsel has value against surveillance, as a strategy for change it raises p⋆. According to the rules of threshold dynamics, the more you feel restricted by a system and want it to change, the more pressure, effort, and masses you should be producing to counter it. Getting out of the way just seems like a terrible idea that will obviously leave you with the exact opposite result to what you want. As we discussed in my first essay, your rights and equality as a participant in a society come with the duty to fight any form of collective gaslighting that wants you to think your rights and equality don’t come with this duty.

The necessity of occupying the public and semi-public spaces cannot be overstated, and no daily personal human worry can make it go away. If people only engaged in public matters when their private lives were perfect, global governance would immediately collapse!

To follow in the Straussian vein of my first post, I have been elaborating on the importance of the stable and vigorous publics because this essay is really about private life.

If you’re still here with me, then let’s go home.

Tug of War

In my 2019 manifesto which kicked off Interintellect, I expressed my belief that people = politics, therefore when you have new kinds of people you will also very soon have new kinds of politics.

My prediction has come true, but it wasn’t and isn’t without precedent. In my forty-one years so far, I have seen the rise of new types of people, and new types of politics. Pundits will praise or lament the online shenanigans of the New Left, the ascent into political power of the alt-right, but we have also seen all sorts of revanchists, transhumanists, traditionalists, effective and ineffective altruists, immortality chasers, UFO chasers, neo-religious movements — and even a handful of people who have moved to Canada for real.

Amid all this color and noise, a more drab development has also been taking place, mostly unnoticed.

Sometime during the past decades, people have become convinced that they have to make their home lives more democratic. In politics, “equality” has two distinct meanings: one means equal in value, the other means sameness. Sometime during the past decades, we decided that our backstage lives — the lives we spend in private — must start including more sameness than previously.

It is natural that people would be confused by the fact that working democracies consist of deeply undemocratic hubs. The thing is a happy family, a well-oiled cohabitation of housemates, two people in love, or a successful startup are very far from being “democratic” or “based on sameness”. Authority and decision-making, exciting personality differences, chains of provisioning and care hold these hubs idiosyncratically together. In some sense, none of these hubs should even work. But they do! That is why to an outside observer, what makes somebody want to work at a specific company or why a couple are attracted to each other can be so baffling and incomprehensible.

No one gets it because it should not in fact “make sense” in the political sense. Take a family for example: in a multigenerational household most people (the elders, the children) don’t earn money at all (are in school, are retired), many don’t vote (under 18), and trying to extend the sameness to all participants (send the grandparents and kids to work?) would be inhumane if not insane. At a startup, co-op style collective representation would be the end of brand, speed and revenue. In a couple, sameness and the accompanying legibility would kill the very myths that draw the two people together. So if you don’t understand why in a family of six that includes two earners, and a genius teen in college, it is still tiny, frail, ninety-year-old Grandma who has never worked a day in her life whose word is ultimately decisive in any matter of dispute, it’s because you’re not supposed to. It is private. Private life is not supposed to be “democratic”. Our democratic systems are built of undemocratic hubs — little personal monarchies — and that is perfectly OK.

Except the world today is conflicted about whether this is OK. Watching my Millennial friends get married and have children, I’m seeing experiments ending in variable results of creating households of absolute equality. What on paper seems desired, because it is desired in public life, namely a bureaucratic equality in the home, seems to be a complex blessing even in best case scenarios. I’m seeing a lot of work, a lot of fighting “natural instincts”, a lot of diminished efficiency, a lot of pushing back against what makes people interested in each other. What is gained, of course, is a kind of democratic dignity, dignity as a public ideal. It is less politically correct these days to ask whether “dignity” is the same inside the small hubs that work best when quite undemocratic as it is out in the public square. You notice this right away when you try to force the moment to its crisis and take some of the current governing ideas to their extremes: Would children have more dignity if they could run for office? Does a startup freelancer’s dignity really increase if they can veto a CFO’s decision? (Did women really have better sex during socialism? Not based on anything I’ve heard!)

You might — often correctly — think: well, OK. So we pay with some lost efficiency for more dignity and representation within our little hubs (companies, families, couples). Don’t we already make these compromises in the public and they’re called “liberal democracy”? We enter social contracts and swear allegiance to collective deliberation, even if some theories suggest a king or autocrat would make faster decisions. In fact, we have discovered that collectively we are smarter and can consider more aspects of reality, therefore decisions that come out of deliberation instead of dictatorial whim will be better decisions. Nothing about liberal democracy is “natural”; we had to learn to live this way and wait for longterm results to conclude this is the best arrangement available however imperfect. So it would make sense to think that after establishing this liberal arrangement outside, it was time to “bring the reforms home”. To now start cleaning out all inequalities, all shortcomings in the little hubs where individuals spend most of their time: their workplaces, their clubs, and their households (all of which after the pandemic are so often the same place).

There is a counterintuitive problem with this, however. The outcome is undeniably visible. When given the choice, people do not seem to want to live in a kind of Phalanstery (truly egalitarian home setups from religious fundamentalists to socialist kibbutzim have been self-contained or temporary).

Sameness also means competition in the Girardian sense — too much competition inside a hub weakens the hub as a player in wider society. When families are in constant dispute, the compulsion might arise to try to solve the matter through public ideology and seek powerful leaders who tell you that yes, you are right and your mom is wrong.

The more egalitarian our private lives are becoming, the more we are seeking dictatorial arrangements in public life. Today, men and women throughout the West congratulate themselves on taking turns at taking out the trash, and then go online and celebrate the breakdown of Western democracy.

The results are the opposite of what you want: less individual color and abandon in the home, and more uniform autocracy in public — a uniform autocracy which step by step erodes the very values of individual equality for which we started reforming our homes and hubs in the first place.

Make It Make Less Sense

In Tyranny as Tragedy, we concluded none of this has to be so. None of this is “fated”, past the tipping point, or arising from some ironclad logic irreversibly. Not yet.

A great way of avoiding the collapse of civic life is to make your home life a little crazier. Or, if it happens to be crazy by default, then just to leave it so.

Intellectual and biological families are self-expression. A democratic public is an expression of collective will. Reversing these two things will lead to the opposite political result of what we want.

There are many benefits to letting the undemocratic hubs from which liberal democracies are built remain themselves.

(1)

The social contracts that bind our personal hubs together are based on personal choice and emotional closeness: a calling to join a group, the act of falling in love, the attachment felt toward relatives are almost always stronger than whatever “unfairness” a person we feel we belong to might commit against us.

Our social contract with the public is far less elective — in the rare cases where we truly can’t live with the form of government we are subjected to, we either have to successfully rise up against it (hard) or leave (hurts). Because of this high price and threshold, having a rational and public say in public matters is crucial.

Private “contracts” are and should be much more complicated. Here, leaving is often far easier and just how people wish to govern themselves can and should be flexibly negotiated. In some cases, a family or company might decide to run themselves fully democratically, but most often they will not, and that is fine. We should point out that the whole point of love is to complicate all social contracts: what could be transactional isn’t, what should be fair is often not, and people seem to take pleasure in carving out a space in their lives where common sense does not need to rule: we give the other person a chance to be a little crazy and in exchange they also give us this same chance. Everybody wins (and recharges).

(2)
Let’s assume that all people are some combination of rational and irrational agent. Even if on the whole the world is becoming a more reasonable and peaceful place, since these are relative qualities, some parts of life, some actions, will necessarily remain more irrational than others. One way of dealing with this would be to ensure all arenas are built mostly on rationality but have some irrational element left in them, a kind of pressure vault.

Another way of going about it would be to help create — or leave intact — entire arenas dedicated to or tolerant of irrationality. For example: Should artists be allowed to be politically incorrect? Can lovers be allowed to be unfair?

Life is not a single homogeneous system, more like an economy: rational and irrational must balance. From where I’m looking at it, attempts to make the private sector and the private life, where things like existential competition and competition for parental attention; romantic love, sex, and death; childbirth, cultural succession, and rebellion; financial worries, creative innovation, and self-narrativization; spiritual beliefs, altruism, and emotional consolation take place to be “more reasonable” seems completely unreasonable if not ridiculous. If there is any realm in life that we might want to keep irrational, the rational thing is to make that the private life.

Keep your love life suffused with symbols and struggle, your company verging on a religious cult, your roommate situation one where you can kick somebody out “based on vibes” all you want — just please don’t bring these urges into politics.

(3)

But this is exactly what is happening. As home life equalizes and bureaucratizes, our despotic instincts are pushed out into the public. Multiple bad loops begin. On the one hand, chaotic (lack of) decision-making seems to make populations crave more decisive, more dictatorial leaders on the public stage. (A famous artistic depiction: Sławomir Mrożek’s excellent play Tango. Here the unreliable, “democratic”, bohemian, Boomer-like parents spawn sectarian, paramilitary offspring. Sounds familiar?)

On the other hand, illiberal leaders will cater to the population’s dissatisfaction in their customary populist way, and so new, “edgy” slogans will pop up, for example to remove women from higher education as a way of “solving” the men’s college admission and alleviating the fertility crisis, or to block talented immigrants from coming into the country to work at startups because that is “unfair” to the locals.

This regression is not what we mean by “letting the hubs be their natural selves” — there is nothing natural about uniform oppression. It’s much more like: unless you ensure your own household can be its own kind of crazy, the wider public will go crazy and impose that very uniform craziness on your hub too, until you check out and disassociate.

(4)

Democracy is not just about self-representation. Individuals in any liberal democracy also represent their households, their oikos. Allowing your artistic guild, your extended family, your polycule, your community garden, or your web development agency to be what it organically wants to be, even if that is not per se democratic, will make the people in it more passionate participants in democracy. Now you are representing not just yourself but all that you love in the world.

***

Due to certain gaps in my general education, I have only recently come across Arrow’s impossibility theorem which is also one of the reasons why I decided to finally write about this topic.

Arrow’s theorem states that when a group has more than 3 options, it will be impossible not to break one of the four pillars of fairness…

• Unrestricted domain: The rule must handle any mix of people’s preferences

• Non-dictatorship: There isn’t a permanent boss whose ranking always becomes the group’s choice

• Pareto efficiency: If everyone prefers A over B, the group should also prefer A over B

• Independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA): The group’s decision between A and B should depend only on how people rank A vs B, not on a third option C

According to Arrow’s theorem, the fact that one of these axioms will have to be violated where there are 3+ options to choose from and so some unfairness will necessarily be committed is mitigated by a “layering” in democratic decision-making: primaries, coalitions, Supreme Court, etc.

In my understanding, Arrow’s theorem proves that it is quite impossible to make smaller hubs fair in the democratic sense. Layering seems to be impossible in small-number groups, be it a marriage, a creative co-op, or a laboratory. You will just have to be unfair along one of these lines — and, once again, that is fine.

I asked GPT 5 to try and apply Arrow’s theorem on my little theory:

Family: museum vs beach vs football

Suppose the three of you rank Saturday plans like this:

• Parent: Museum ≻ Beach ≻ Football

• Teen: Beach ≻ Football ≻ Museum

• Child: Football ≻ Museum ≻ Beach

Pairwise votes produce a cycle:

• Museum beats Beach (2–1),

• Beach beats Football (2–1),

• Football beats Museum (2–1).

No stable winner! To move, families quietly drop an axiom:

• Non-dictatorship breaks: “Okay, Mom decides this time—Museum.”

• IIA breaks (context flips A vs B): “It’s going to rain, so Beach is out—Football vs Museum now feels different.”

• Unrestricted domain narrows: “No football in crowded parks—choose Museum or Beach.”
  Or you smooth “fairness” over time (rotate who chooses; split domains: “you pick Saturdays, I pick movies”).

Startup: which feature to build first

Three founders rank options:

• A: Payments ≻ Dashboard ≻ Notifications

• B: Dashboard ≻ Notifications ≻ Payments

• C: Notifications ≻ Payments ≻ Dashboard

You can again get cycles. To ship, teams pick a poison:

• Designate a product owner (relax non-dictatorship): “PM makes the call—Payments.”

• Let context reweight choices (violate IIA): “Big customer needs Payments → that flips Dashboard vs Payments.”

• Restrict the domain (limit unrestricted domain): “Only features with revenue impact count this quarter.”

Bottom line: Families and startups work by explicitly or tacitly relaxing a fairness axiom—using roles, context, or time-sharing—because perfect procedural democracy with 3+ options is logically impossible and practically paralyzing.

This, of course, raises deeper epistemological questions about what “rationality” even is. You should be reading these real-life examples and feeling that rational does not equal fair: Mom is being perfectly rational in her choice, and so is the PM. It is simply that in the public realm what is rational and what is fair just works differently. One could argue that the Wild West that is every family, every couple, every group of inventors is closer to the baseline human rationality. Theirs just is a type of rationality that we call “crazy” — and a type that works best when confined to smaller hubs, so the doctrine of fairness doesn’t end up being accidentally relaxed for the entire country.

***

Philosophers have of course been on to this for a long time. To Aristotle, the oikos was a monarchy. Hegel thought the family was ruled not by rights but by love (in fact that rights begin only when the family dissolves). Flaubert wanted you to be a well-respected citizen, so you can taste excess in private. If you’re American, the above might have reminded you of Oakeshott’s ideas of “enterprise associations”. If you are like me a European, you must be smirking now remembering the Dionysian madness in Nietzsche, and the irrepressible necessity of keeping it alive in certain parts of the self and society. You will also recall Kierkegaard’s loving and unfair God breaking His pact with Abraham and then renewing it even stronger, or how to Kierkegaard personal commitment was aesthetic self-expression.

If you look closely enough, the theme pops up all over the place: the art nouveau pornographer Georges Bataille of course wanted you to have an unproductive realm in your life. Max Weber warned you against dried-out Protestant ergonomics. The Frankfurt School warned you against a loss of identity.

Even Hannah Arendt — so unfairly in love herself — contended that freedoms might just be the stuff of public life and nowhere else. Just as I was fact-checking this essay, I ran across a few sections in her The Human Condition which I had only read in parts until now.

Here is a GPT 5 summary of these parts of the text:

In The Human Condition II, Arendt draws a strict boundary: the household (oikos) is “born of necessity,” a sphere of unequal, life-maintenance labor, while the polis is “the sphere of freedom,” where equals appear to one another in speech and deed and where “what is merely necessary or useful” is excluded from politics; modernity dissolves this line in the “rise of society,” the pulling of “household and housekeeping activities to the public realm,” so that public life becomes enlarged housekeeping and private life thins out. Within this map, love has a definite place: “love, by its very nature, is unworldly,” indeed “not only apolitical but antipolitical”; it needs shelter from publicity, just as politics needs protection from domestic necessity. When we blur the realms, both suffer: action and plurality decay in public, and the thick, intimate affections of private life are distorted or evaporate.

It is quite interesting that a lot of monarchic impulses in contemporary American politics (Thiel, Yarvin, crowned Trump memes on X) come out of the success of such arrangements in the private realm of startups. Trying to apply kingly instincts on the wider public has led to mixed results.

My startup, Interintellect, is definitely not a democracy. But my undemocratic hub, in the larger sense, does contribute to the American democratic system. We produce goods and make money, employ people and pay taxes, and through our successes make American business more competitive on the international scale. By being weird, efficient, innovative, and unique, our mere existence increases creative pluralism in the United States. And so it is with every hub — companies, families, orchestras, love affairs — in any free country where expression is allowed and the state doesn’t interfere in the private sphere of individuals.

Our battles for equality should be fought in public; making the home the main “domain of the fight” in the Marxist sense is ill-conceived. While you were so focused on who empties the dishwasher or whether playing Pictionary at the team retreat would offend any one of your 150 employees, far bigger and more ominous versions of unfairness have entered the public realm and now will be very hard to get rid of.

***

I have been musing about these seemingly paradoxical phenomena ever since I moved to the US last year. Oftentimes you really have to see things up-close to gain an understanding. It is because the theory sounds so contradictory that you have to see how life, in its infinite and insane wisdom, allows for the irreconcilable to coexist and create ultimately positive processes.

I must admit that I had resisted my own intuitions about this for quite a while, and that is very typical of how full of biases and prejudices we all are facing universal facts thanks to whatever particular life experience we might have undergone. I grew up in an extraordinarily chaotic family myself where both of my parents worked — first successfully, then unsuccessfully — in show business. Rules were arbitrary, homes were loud, and I was often afraid for my safety. Sexual mores were exploitative: babysitters were harassed and then disappeared, girlfriends were discardable. Crime was always at the doorstep (ask any film producer what I mean by this). Up to relatively recently, my personal, self-defensive instincts always revolved around “making my home quieter and more rational”, because in my mind chaos equaled the very unique and strange circumstances I experienced in childhood. Now I know that I was somewhat wrong. There is healthy crazy. My company is healthy crazy and has been for many years. My long, deep, passionate friendships and loves are all healthy crazy. They contain no sameness and little democracy, but all rest on respect and dignity for equal value. Perhaps that is what religions call “grace”. Perhaps there is only a religious way of even conceptualizing it.

These days I think “grace” just manifests very differently in public and in private — and this difference is softened and diluted in the semi-public spaces the survival of which we must all fight for with all our resources. Make the home grayer and less fun, and people will bring their need for transgression out into the open, into the public where close and tactile bonds and irrational love cannot overwrite the gross unfairness. The grace of the publics, as Habermas thinks, is discursive and rational. But every home is a home of the animal. Let the animal out of its natural dwelling place and it will wreak havoc where laws should be made.

Turn your ambitions outward and bring your world-changing to the public. The dishes can wait. By letting your home be a little messier, you will end up creating a public that is more perfect.

Anna

Tyranny as Tragedy

“The most important rule of theater is that the king is never played by the actor playing the king, but by all the other actors around him.” (Old theater adage)

The greatest playwrights know everything about human nature not because they have some mystical, clairvoyant insight into you or me, but due to the structural constraints of their format: in order for tragedies to work — for problems, decisions, and plot twists to be accepted by the audience as true — the writers must learn to tweak the interactions between the characters until those seem logical and believable to all. Accessing good theater gives you a significant cheat code for accessing human thinking and behavior. Read Sophocles, watch Laurence Olivier’s Shakespeare adaptations, see Molière or Chekhov on stage, enter a book club debate about Brecht, David Mamet or Yasmina Reza, and you will experience many “Aha!” moments that will be assets in your subsequent life. You will also, of course, feel aesthetic pleasure and what Aristotle calls catharsis, or emotional purification, which is why most people engage with plays in the first place. The great knowledge that you will be gifted is just the bonus.

How dramatic storytelling works — to paraphrase one of my favorite movies on the matter, Stranger Than Fiction — is simply: “in comedy you get hitched; in tragedy you die”. This is a fun way to summarize how theater always deals with love and death, nothing less. In the comedy Much Ado About Nothing (spoiler!) of course the sparring man and woman eventually fall in love and marry, and we can assume they will go and make many babies. (“The world must be peopled,” says Benedick.) Life. In the tragedy Hamlet, the last scene leaves the stage covered in corpses (some people even die behind curtains or while being shipped to England). Both would-be fiancé and fiancée perish, a foreign power takes over the nation, and there are definitely 0 babies. Death. We like to criticize the kiss at the end of canonical Disney films, but they are not as superficial as you might think. The other option is extinction.

The most infuriating thing about tragedies is that they are avoidable. Oedipus could technically marry someone completely different who is not his own mother. Sure, the prophecies tell him he will do this, but it is then his own free choice to see the nuptials through with a total stranger. (Then, of course: Surprise!) All blockbuster movies about disasters emphasize human error and not just because we humans think we’re the center of the universe (although we do). Delayed evacuations in invasion movies like Independence Day cause many people’s death, greedy humans fake coroner’s reports and don’t shut down the beaches in time in Jaws, human hubris and business interests allow for the T. rex to break free in Jurassic Park, and elitism and incompetence create unprecedented loss of life on the Titanic. It is because these events would be avoidable or at least mitigable that we feel these stories are tragedies. A tragedy is always human doing. (Contrast this with movie plots like the terminal illness in Terms of Endearment that is nobody’s fault or, e.g., The Impossible where a family’s members all miraculously survive the Thai tsunami. Watching the movie, the 2004 tsunami may be registered in the viewer’s mind as one of the saddest events in recent memory, but we experience it as drama, not tragedy. No one is sinning; in fact the characters are doing the best they can and more.)

Humans make bad decisions in comedies too — every comedy is a “comedy of errors”. These errors tend to revolve around some deception that propels the characters to change and grow until the mistake is revealed and cleared up. In a farce, characters run around and hide behind doors to eavesdrop on a secret rendezvous. There is a lot of cross-dressing in comedies from Shakespeare to Some Like It Hot or Tootsie, everybody falls in love with the wrong person and then somehow all’s well that ends well. We love to laugh at stupidity the way it is represented in comedy because we can feel smarter than the deceived characters. In tragedy, stupidity is death, and the audience is overpowered by the feeling that they can see the evil outcome coming but can do nothing to stop it. The Shakespearean Prologue — starting the play with the spoiler — is a fine proof of this. The Three Witches who curse Macbeth in their opening dialogue resign us to the horrors we’re about to witness without giving us any concrete pointers. That Richard III tells us at the beginning that he plans to become a murderous jerk offers us scant comfort when we’re helplessly watching him execute (quite literally) on his promise. In a comedy, we’re usually aware of the truth right away and laugh our way along until the characters catch up to it too. In a tragedy, truth and method build up gradually, inescapably, and the fact that we’re aware only increases our own sense of impotence. We’re spiraling along with the characters. While a comedy might help us escape from real life, tragedy feels too much like it, and our only hope left is Aristotle’s empathetic purge: in his framework, humans become better people when seeing a tragic play and I believe that is correct. Facing what feels structurally inevitable, the only reaction we have left is emotional.

Every tragedy is a study of escalation. After each event, each scene, fewer options remain to avoid a bad outcome. Let’s take a popular example I’m sure you’re familiar with: Romeo and Juliet.

When the play opens, we are told what will happen: two young people from rival families will meet, fall in love, and then die. (Remember: tragedy = death = no babies.) But when the play opens, we see no problem: Romeo and Juliet don’t know each other, Romeo is pining for some other girl, and only his emo friend is talking about the dangers of love. At this point, anything can still happen — and be avoided.

Then the escalation begins. In each scene, the characters start making decisions that leave fewer choices in the next, until the only option that remains is death. With each new event we will forget the previous scene where none of this seemed predetermined. After each scene we will be more and more convinced that the horrible development of events is the correct, logical, predetermined one. I’ve always wondered if in Shakespeare’s time the Prologue was really a heads-up to the audience before the play so they don’t end up storming the stage later and trying to confiscate the actors’ daggers. (“FYI, guys…”)

In her first scene, Juliet learns she’s now an old lady at 13, and will very soon be expected to marry and sleep with some old guy she hasn’t even met. In that moment, she kind of grows up: now the idea of hooking up with a man is suddenly not so ludicrous to her. Romeo crashes a party to stalk his crush. He instead falls for the first rebound he encounters, the newly maturing Juliet. A lot of things that a few minutes ago felt unthinkable, now make “total sense” to the audience. Of course this happened! We heard that they were consciously or subconsciously looking for love anyway! And then they ran into each other! Of course! The audience can nod or shake their heads knowingly.

Romeo, having just entered puberty himself, will of course sneak into Juliet’s garden at night, and then somehow end up proposing to her. She is of course more psyched about the idea of marrying into her own age group if she can choose. And it is because she can choose that the escalation continues…

Whether in a tragedy or comedy, when people marry (Romeo and Juliet) or die (Mercutio, Tybalt) the options suddenly narrow very drastically. Just like in real life! In this play, exile, missed messages, pretend-poison and real poison are now at play. Romeo runs into accidental, external obstacles — the Capulet boys looking for a fight, Balthasar arriving too early — and must react. Juliet encounters internal restrictions. In one of the most brilliant scenes in the play, Juliet’s nurse gives her the option to betray Romeo and just chill out and go double-marry her original suitor, but by this point Juliet is of course not free to make this choice, both out of love for her new husband Romeo and because of law and religion. It is simply no longer possible. Each scene tightens on the previous scene’s noose around freedom. And so even before risking real death, Juliet must choose a death of her identity: losing her hometown and following Romeo into exile, and losing the one person who is like family to her, the Nurse, whom she loved and trusted her whole life (and who assisted with and encouraged her affair with Romeo). If you thought this play was only about young lust and bad luck, ask yourself if you, the adult, would behave as honorably in such situations as do these two Verona kids.

If you like mathematical explanations, you can model a tragedy as an entropy funnel:

Every scene in Romeo and Juliet adds constraints that eliminate alternatives and raise the probability of tragedy: the surprisal (−log p) of that ending steadily falls.

Bigger shocks like the life/death events we mentioned above are high-information pivots that fast reduce the option space and reconfigure the transition graph. Formally, the story is an absorbing Markov chain with BOTH DIE as the absorbing state and fewer and fewer return edges to safety.

Because the Prologue reveals the outcome, audience outcome surprisal is near 0 from the start. Instead we’re dealing with path surprisal: the high-information question of how the (sense of) inevitability is reached.

When we watch The Impossible, we mourn those who died because of the tsunami. Watching Romeo and Juliet we mourn ourselves: we saw the escalation, we saw the window of action narrowing, we knew those decisions were steadily decreasing the likelihood of a good outcome, and we just watched along and felt more and more that there was never a way out anyway. We’re left with the vague and disturbing memory that none of this should have happened. That Friar Laurence should have just briefed Balthasar, or Romeo should have just got Tybalt arrested instead of killing him, and that the two lovers should have somehow either reconciled their families with the help of the Prince or gone into exile together and had all those babies people in comedies have. (But then Romeo and Juliet would have been a comedy. At the end of Much Ado About Nothing, the similarly fake-dead Hero is “resurrected” and she does marry Claudio and have the babies, etc. The fact that in comedies things turn out well and in tragedies they don’t, despite the very similar topics and storylines, reminds the audience of the immense, almost unbearable fragility of life: we all live on the knife’s edge between comedy and tragedy.)

In comedy, you laugh because the characters should know better. In tragedy, you mourn because you should have known better.

***

Some famous tragedies — Antigone, Julius Caesar — are about tyrants. But every tyranny in real life works like a tragedy. Every tyranny is a study of escalation. Tragedy is about death, and comedy is about life. Maybe this is why autocrats hate comedians so much.

Autocracy is the death of freedom, and how societies get there is by a process of escalation after every step of which people feel they have fewer choices, and the outcome feels more and more inevitable. Step by step people forget they used to have more freedoms just a minute ago.

The Canadian war historian Margaret MacMillan jokes that there are 15,000 books written about why the First World War broke out — because we don’t understand! (There are 0 books written about why the Second World War broke out because that we do understand.) How the European powers at the start of the 20th century talked themselves and each other into the all-transforming carnage that was WWI still requires accurate scholarship to even begin to understand: it was entirely avoidable, and only felt mysteriously “fated” to those locked into the step-by-step machinery of conflict escalation at the time. The result, as you know, was tragedy. Destruction at a previously unimaginable scale that changed our economy, mindset, and society forever. Our world today is still as WWI left it. And 15,000 books still cannot figure out why the whole thing happened; why people — people just like you and me — chose to make it happen.

How societies lose their freedom to tyrants follows the same pattern. There is a reason why so many autocrats come into power in wartime or during some perceived threat. Carl Schmitt (pro) and Giorgio Agamben (con) will tell you about the dubious terrains of a state of exception. Roman history will show you that some dictators (Cincinnatus, Sulla) leave after the danger is over — but that many don’t or don’t want to. Contemporary theorists like Richard Sennett or George Lakoff will outline, in a kind of Hegelian master/slave setup, how authoritarians can stay in power largely because they relax us with their fatherly presence. We feel safer and we don’t want it to end. We give up our autonomy when manipulated into it, in exchange for what we see as attention and care given to us. Anne Applebaum and Johannes Gerschewski explain the importance of co-option in the consolidation of power: successful, lasting tyrannies make sure that mediocre apparatchiks, minions, heads of satellite states, etc., get more power in the unfree, centralized arrangement than they would in a more competitive, open system where they would just be total losers probably.

Underneath all these helpful theories lurks the question of escalation, and the reaching of the point from where there is either no return or at least people feel there isn’t. (When it comes to outcomes, the two are sadly the same.)

Let’s think about the Roman Empire for a second. The rise of the democratic Octavian into the autocratic Augustus was entirely avoidable for a long time. Many, many steps had to be taken from which things could still have gone another way, or been undone.

To ensure my analysis is accurate, I’ve enlisted GPT 5 to follow my Romeo and Juliet entropy funnel model and apply it on the rise of Augustus as an illustration of how options narrow “as in tragedy, as in tyranny” (I have reformatted it slightly for your ease of reading):

Octavian’s rise is an entropy funnel toward the absorbing state ONE-MAN RULE: early off-ramps exist but shrink quickly.

• 44 BCE (Caesar’s will/adoption) concentrates name, cash, and veteran loyalty—avoidable if the Senate had contested the testament or Octavian stayed a private heir (p ≈ 0.25; avoidability: high).

• 43 (Lex Titia, Second Triumvirate) suspends normal politics—avoidable if powers were refused or tightly time-boxed (p ≈ 0.40; avoidability: medium).

• 42 (Philippi) destroys the main republican armies—avoidable if Brutus/Cassius won or forced amnesty and a constitutional deal (p ≈ 0.60; avoidability: falling).

• 41–40 (Perusine) secures Italy and land for veterans—avoidable if land reform compromised or L. Antonius/Fulvia prevailed (p ≈ 0.66; avoidability: low).

• 40–39 (Brundisium/Misenum) buys time and grain while Agrippa builds a fleet—avoidable if Sextus’s blockade compelled a Senate-led peace capping all three men (p ≈ 0.68; avoidability: low).

• 36 (Naulochus + Lepidus sidelined) leaves Octavian master of the West—avoidable only if Agrippa lost at sea or Lepidus remained coequal (p ≈ 0.82; avoidability: minimal).

• 34 (Donations of Alexandria) hands Octavian propaganda—avoidable if Antony kept Roman optics (p ≈ 0.84; avoidability: minimal).

• 32 (Antony’s will exposed; war on Cleopatra) nationalizes the conflict—avoidable if the will stayed sealed and arbitration replaced a “foreign” war (p ≈ 0.89; avoidability: minimal).

• 31 (Actium) breaks Antony—avoidable if he fought on land, escaped with the fleet, or accepted partition (p ≈ 0.94; avoidability: vanishing).

• 30 (fall of Alexandria; Egypt annexed) yields treasure, grain, no peers—avoidable if Egypt became a senatorial province or its revenues were put under public control (p ≈ 0.96; avoidability: vanishing).

• 29 (triple triumph; Janus closed) normalizes a peace mandate—avoidable if honors were tied to term-limited emergency power (p ≈ 0.97; avoidability: vanishing).

• 27 (First Settlement) “returns” power while keeping the legion-rich provinces—avoidable if the Senate retained those provinces/legions under rotating commanders (p ≈ 0.985; avoidability: near-zero).

• 23 (Second Settlement) adds tribunicia potestas and imperium maius—by now practically inescapable, avoidable only if the Senate denied or strictly time-boxed them or required a permanent coequal with veto (p ≈ 0.995; avoidability: negligible).

• My view: after Naulochus and Lepidus’s removal the option space collapses from “reversible with luck” to “structurally locked”—resource control, veteran patronage, and the 27/23 constitutional toolkit erase return edges, so p(Principate) → 1, and “avoidability” becomes mostly counterfactual embroidery rather than plausible politics.

(I like it when ChatGPT says “my view”…)

As the kids would say about the above: many such cases. When people start feeling that there is “no other choice”, [1] that is almost always the result of our own previous actions, and [2] there is almost always a lot more other options left than we think (yes, even 1 is a lot more than 0!).

In fact, we tend to start thinking there is “no other choice” way too early: the mathematical analysis of both historical tyrannies and famous tragedies show just how many things could still have been done. Tyrannies — like tragedies — act like self-fulfilling prophecies if one is not careful. (No wonder the Greeks actually put self-fulfilling prophecies into their plays, see the aforementioned Oedipus Rex.)

If you read the go-to works of political philosophy such as Carl Schmitt or Michel Foucault, you will notice descriptions of — even advice around — escalation or avoidance thereof. I like to joke that Schmitt, while purportedly on the Right of course, could totally be read from the Left as a manual for avoiding being subjected to dictatorship. You can literally go read what an autocrat would want to do to you and just not allow it. It’s right there on the page, openly.

On the other side, Foucault, our celeb lefty, can be easily read by an enterprising right-winger as a manual for imposing total surveillance and loss of identity on a selected populace. You can organize a book club (list it on Interintellect?) where you go through the two books chapter by chapter only focusing on escalation (of loss of freedom) and evitability (counteraction options).

We humans seem to be uniquely bad at discussing or even perceiving our options. As in our personal lives, we’re blinded by our conflicting emotions — and life is not an airplane where exit routes are marked on the floor by twinkling arrows. Egyptians who remember the 20th century, people who were in Russia or Turkey in the past 25 years, will tell you how they noticed they had lost their freedom “too late”. They will, quite wrongly, conclude that by the time they became conscious of violence, censorship, the disappearance of the opposition and their funding, how the media turned into a propaganda factory, how the leaders’ imaginary enemies started populating the discourse, the official marginalization of certain groups in society, how parliamentary deliberation had become a parody of itself — or how in some cases even an outright war could suddenly break out — there was already nothing they could have done. That somehow a handful of people in suits was stronger than an entire nation, and that the money, talents, and intelligence of millions or hundreds of millions of people were somehow not enough to find a different way of doing things and build it.

When it comes to classical dictatorships, at some point the people would be almost right: after a while, indeed, there was nothing left to do, or at least almost nothing — just like for Romeo and Juliet. In modern illiberal societies, however, this is rarely so final. I’m originally from Budapest and I was there watching the rise of Viktor Orbán in front of my face from his 2002 election loss until the consolidation of his power in 2012. All of it was entirely avoidable. And Hungary still isn’t a military dictatorship with a violent secret service like, e.g., Stalin’s USSR was. All of it is happening in broad daylight in the middle of Europe and, sure, things might be difficult to change but it’s not like nothing can be done.

Here is GPT 5 again — I’m using it for accuracy (dates, names, etc.). I’ve asked it to apply my tragedy model (my “tragedy as entropy funnel” idea) first on the consolidation of dictatorship in Egypt:

Think of modern Egypt’s 20th-century authoritarianism as an entropy funnel whose absorbing state is a military-presidential security state: each pivot shrinks the republican/pluralist option space and lowers the surprisal of one-man rule. Egypt (absorbing state: military-presidential security state). Modern Egypt’s consolidation is an entropy funnel in which early off-ramps narrow fast and p(autocracy) climbs.

• 1952–54 the Free Officers abolish parties, sideline Naguib, and crush the Brotherhood after the 1954 attempt on Nasser—avoidable if parties had remained legal and a dual-power arrangement survived (p ≈ 0.35 → 0.45; avoidability: medium).

• 1956 a plebiscite constitution installs Nasser and a one-party mobilization machine; Suez furnishes a legitimacy windfall—avoidable if multiparty competition had been preserved and plebiscitary politics resisted (p ≈ 0.55; avoidability: medium).

• 1962–66 the National Charter founds the Arab Socialist Union as sole party and Qutb’s execution signals ideological repression—avoidable if single-party monopoly and political trials were rejected (p ≈ 0.65; avoidability: falling).

• 1967→ the Six-Day War ushers in routine Emergency Law, normalizing exceptional courts and detention—avoidable if emergency powers were tightly time-boxed and judicially constrained (p ≈ 0.75; avoidability: low).

• 1971–81 Sadat’s constitution hard-wires a very strong presidency; the NDP (from 1978) converts “multi-party” life into de facto single-party dominance; after Sadat’s assassination, Mubarak keeps the emergency for decades—avoidable if executive/emergency authorities were pared back and party dominance not fused with security rule (p ≈ 0.90 → 0.95; avoidability: minimal).

• Arab Spring and today: 2011 topples Mubarak and briefly widens the option space; 2012 elects Morsi; 2013 the military ousts him and the ensuing crackdown re-closes the system; 2014–19 constitutional/institutional changes entrench the presidency; 2020s elections under Sisi restore the pre-2011 trajectory—net effect: avoidability spikes briefly in 2011–12 then collapses again, with p(autocracy) returning toward 0.95–0.98.

On the other hand, if I ask GPT 5 to run the same model on how “inevitable” the irreversible-looking entrenchment of the power of Viktor Orbán — or, in fact, of any potential illiberal leader in the West — is, things look much less stark. It looks like, mathematically, we in the West are indeed far more free to take action against the ossification of autocratic systems, and to avoid the reaching of points that will feel like points of no return.

In short, in the West (and that is not an accident but by design a part of our political systems) we can — with more or less effort — avoid and/or reverse processes of dictatorial escalation.

Hungary / Orbán (absorbing state: DOMINANT-PARTY RULE). Orbán’s trajectory raises p(autocracy) but stops short of full absorption because EU/legal counterweights persist.

• 2006–09 setup: the leaked Őszöd speech and riots discredit incumbents; the 2008–09 crisis and a technocratic interlude prime voters for a reset—avoidable if the governing camp had stabilized earlier and shared reform ownership (p increases modestly; avoidability: high).

• 2010 Fidesz–KDNP wins a two-thirds supermajority—avoidable if supermajority use had been self-limited by cross-party pact (p ≈ 0.35; avoidability: medium).

• 2010–11 media laws create a powerful regulator—avoidable if appointments were plural and review robust (p ≈ 0.45; avoidability: medium).

• 2011 the Fundamental Law plus many “cardinal” laws entrench two-thirds constraints—avoidable if domains were narrower, sunsetted, and opposition-backed (p ≈ 0.60; avoidability: falling).

• 2011–12 electoral redesign (single-round SMDs, redistricting, “winner-compensation”) structurally tilts competition—avoidable if an independent map and two-round or preferential voting remained (p ≈ 0.68; avoidability: low).

• 2013 the Fourth Amendment narrows Constitutional Court review—avoidable if rule-of-law recommendations were heeded (p ≈ 0.72; avoidability: low).

• 2017–20 “Lex CEU” squeezes a flagship university (later found incompatible at EU level)—avoidable if higher-ed rules complied with treaty obligations (p ≈ 0.76; avoidability: low).

• 2020 a pandemic enabling act normalizes ruling by decree—avoidable if strict time-limits and oversight applied (p ≈ 0.80; avoidability: low).

• 2021 public-interest foundations move assets and universities to loyal boards—avoidable if governance were plural and reversible (p ≈ 0.83; avoidability: minimal).

• 2022 elections proceed on an uneven field (media bias, state-resource misuse) even as they remain competitive—avoidable if campaign–state separation were enforced and opposition coordination improved (p ≈ 0.87; avoidability: low).

• Now: opposition holds important municipalities, courts and EU conditionality still bite, and elections continue; avoidability is reduced but real, with p(dominant-party rule) ≈ 0.82–0.88, not converging to 1 so long as external legal/fiscal levers and municipal bases persist.

In sum: Egypt 2–5% vs. Hungary 12–18% → A Hungarian democratic shift is about 2.4× to 9× more likely.

In a tragedy, the characters hurtle toward mutual destruction in a process that feels gradually more inevitable in every scene. In a tyranny, societies feel the same: after each battle, each assassination, each deployment of the military in the cities, after each new piece of freedom-curtailing legislation people feel that fewer options remain. They feel that the escalation is somehow “logical”. In political systems which pose as tyrannies — which use some external kitsch signaling of autocratic rule, but which don’t have any real dictatorial legitimacy or power — each step is reversible with far more ease than those posing up there might want you to think.

Modern wannabe autocrats in the West mess with your head. It’s a process more of gaslighting than of real escalation. Changing the language, changing the visuals, changing the way social media platforms work change your perception of reality. As a human being, an individual, a Tocquevillian participant in society, you are not supposed to be enduring such changes like a child looking for the nearest source of creature comfort and being content being fed bedtime stories. It is your personal and social responsibility to pay attention to what actual reality is. To seek out information and opinions, to double check facts, to discuss the past, the present, and the future with your friends (and enemies); to keep discussing your options.

Look at the establishment of the real dictatorships of yore and you will see, ultimately, past societies that, somehow, step by step, allowed that to happen, allowed that to be done to them. Societies that were first made to believe there was nothing that could have been done, until at some point there was really no way to turn back anymore. Every tyranny is a tragedy. Up to the very last moment there are always way more options than you think: to not flee, to not kill the enemy, to not drink the poison. You don’t have to do it. No one can make you do it.

I love America and choose to live here today because this is a society that tends to know better: where the sovereignty of hundreds of millions of individuals builds into the sovereignty of a nation. Pretty hard to subject so many individualists to oppressive, autocratic rule. Many, many people would first need to give up their right to happiness, to truth and information, to open deliberation and a free media, and the idea that the people in this country were all created equal for that to happen.

Each death is an anticlimax; there’s nothing to say, and no one to say it to. The protagonist: speechless! The parents pass on laurels you never wanted. You win but you win what? Living is winning. The young always win, prized is being next in line and the rest indeed is silence. 

It’s not going to stop, says my friend, oh no, as I enter the vortex of informed adulthood where everybody’s simultaneously strong and bold and sore; where I want to hear each story, your every bare defeat, and for the love of God please shut up, see how I can’t take on any more? 

Not how I wanted to win, Daddy, not through the accidents of dates, of age and cell and rot, the war not won just cut, the long chokehold of coming back, feet stuck at the bottoms of stairs; the cotton hair, my scrubs, the care, my wait. Out there science.

Not how I wanted to win, no, not this losing, not by an end, not by being damned to wondering and re-wondering what you meant to say when you called the day before and no one went. But I could be disremembering: all dates are accidents. 

Every piece of writing is unjust, petty, a revenge. Who are we to state the obvious? In obvious states claim otherwise? The other side: silent. Arguing back a time it all seemed at standstill. A stencil of hope, a slice of pretext, back when it all seemed oh-so writable. Stepping backward into the same stream of thought you thought was thought-through and over. And now here you are – so unfair again, so verbal again, the tactic all syntactic. A phase, you’re sure, a li’l pressure on the tip of the pen. Here you go, then, ready to murder again. So kill. 

March 9, 2024

Even if there is little cohesion, you and I might learn from each other what’s true. I’m an unrestrained version of my generation. I have no country, no kin, no pension. I pace brand new carpets and sink into old thoughts, there’s nothing under my feet that could crack. You’re pulled by some force that destroys what you’ve left behind, a call that goes mum whenever you try to call back. But it’s just homesickness, that’s all, for ship and for crew, just someone standing still with what’s left in her mind.

I must admit I often seek advice, and I’m sought after for such things more often. Personal setbacks make my sharp tips soften, and when I win, no one has much counsel for me. When those who went the other way come to me, at first I’m unsure what they think I could say: I fled their towns after all, their schools, ranks, and gardens (though, it turns out, not all of their problems!), the honest response to any query would be a suggestion they flee. But one seeks to personalise these things, take into account who’s asking and why.

When those that I travelled with ask for my insight, I wonder, sitting in this circus, if they’re like me, would they even hear it? A life so jagged or beastly shaped, how could my one-flame take even near it, so many liars, so many outliers, curious votes and vows abound, where’s the homology, the one-size-fits-all-ogy on which for me to rely?

And so in my generation we’ve come to revisit that old fork in the road from time to time, we form a strange squarish circle of life advice together, whisper from ear to ear or shout loudly into the never, and laugh at how none of us knows.

It’s June again, the sun flies back high, the open roads once more stand and shine for sure steps to follow their lean curves with conviction. It’s the time of year when I come around from a school-long haze to find my hands busy with work I love so, my asks are small, I trust a happy end much more when awoken.

What is an adult if not a soul that plots, each bright day the plan revealed? Our nobility is enclosed in the itinerary, dark winters make me take on dark fights, a losing of oneself in the parts, the shapes of the land I will plant can be scanned only with a still gaze.

You must have fled yourself a thousand times to look at great roads calmly, to find a home in forward movement and not stop. Ruth bows her head to the heir though she will be one. The soul that knows, Rilke says, is a woman. 

The plan rewards not sleepers but keen workers.

So I was caught unprepared the other day, like in that Sharon Olds poem where after a lifetime’s hatred she accidentally forgives her mother, when I seem to have found the thorn that had always hurt me, grabbed it, and just pulled it out, I couldn’t even feel a thing just that I had stopped crying, I now notice the lithe façades of buildings outside and my muscles, the shape of my arms at dance, the curves of this city, the music hummed, there’s some happiness looming here with serious consequences, and I have no idea what those consequences are or what to do.

All I know is that something that had bothered me all my life—well, I’ve found it. I see the thorn in the palm of my hand and can decide what to do with it. The ensemble cast of my existence, this commedia dell’arte, is being reshuffled, a falsehood in which I was complicit suddenly seems elective, the rewards promised in exchange for it less enticing. Like Sharon Olds, I have zero idea who I am without the thorn in my flesh, but as they say: I’m excited to find out.

For the first time since I emigrated, I don’t feel grief. One thorn to throw away and one walks tall once more, these baby steps onto a boundless road. I have no clue what comes next or how far I’ll walk now, but thorns are for self-defence that other creatures stab with at random; we extract them and shed them with intention. Like a spell it ends when one rejects that sharp embedding, the foreign body, the wanderer needs his free and healthy feet. What a quiet shift this is, this tiptoeing onward, no fireworks this time, just a clear moon in a calm sky starting its cycle.

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Read the first piece: here (it’s very personal and very important to me, curious what you think!)

1. Because I’ve stopped believing in the lifestyle advertising of alcohol, that it would be gastronomically distinguished, or mixologically refined, the natural heritage, the whatever grape, the support of the small business, it’s a lie.

2. Because you can see it in people’s faces as they get older, and I am getting older.

3. Because quitting alcohol is the cheapest, fastest, simplest way to acquire a major superpower and make my life drastically better.

4. Because I’ve recently seen people I respect drunk for the first time and not in the least at their best; in fact I’ve never seen anyone improved by drink, ever.

5. Because two drinks in I get melancholic, three I start crying, at night I have nightmares and sleep lightly or not at all, and the next day I’m depressed or sick or both—I don’t think I’ve ever had any alcohol tolerance, I just used to smoke cigarettes and that helped.

6. Because drinking makes me want to smoke cigarettes; it makes me accept (but not like) bad food and bad sex.

7. Because it’s an expensive way to make myself unhealthy, sad, and fat, and to embarrass myself, or feel that I do, in public.

8. Because we drink to soften life’s regrets but most of my bad memories from adulthood involve drinking—the rages, the heartbreaks, the slumps; because drinking promises to ease the pain over what’s lost but I’ve lost things in my life because I or someone I was with was drunk.

9. Because this will be a great way for me to filter friends and lovers better—does it still work sober, are we having fun with the lights on… can you live with remembering me to the fullest?

10. Because I’m curious to see what happens if I do.

I’m sharing this in case this is you.

When asked, I explain my own drive as a boring head, my thoughts will ram unstoppably forward, I pick up only what flows on, what plows me on. But as I was now pacing I did have to admit my boring too, this feverish push, was in the direction of restoration, a recreation of something thought lost, tracing vague visions of what good was, of golden ages of shorn pasts, copycat trails to mourn never-been vistas, a redoing of snapped seams, a frayed winning of some war fought at some epic beginning, an axiom of how restoring redeems—build back better but what’s better than what is?—; I stayed up and saw our wish weaving sunk myths, mapped unhurt selves, of shelves still teeming with treasures, a buried premise of peace and of lust, of overheard goals of people we knew and knew not, the blurred trunks under beds heaving with pleasures we wish they’d packed amid funs that never ended.

I paced on and back and found a stunned distrust for hero’s journeys for they return to the start. Isn’t every love, every child a plan toward recourse—the source—, a coil; is every human toil a conservation of the never-seen; is that after all what renders us what we are, this instinct to undo the fall, the flight back to where what’s yours surrenders to what you hope will never die? I walked, I walked, and I found all this grieving for the ‘50s, the ‘80s—so unreal—, even last night; each of us on some atonal reverse quest, trying without rest to reinstall what is gone, our legacy losses thrust out there as life, cleaving into futures like they’re new. We stand with our Edens trapped, and still, it’s true, carried around upon us like a seal.

I never did drugs and never needed to, I was up for 20 hours each day, I could drive cross-country, pack out, do two shows, attend the party, all the while doing two master’s degrees in parallel. That exhaustion, my mascara smeared into white pillows, The Boho Dance alright in my neat rooftop pad, with my books, the wannabe bourgeois caught at the crossroads, I vomited on multiple rockstars’ shoes at the MTV launch gig, I felt like a tigress every day, until it made me sick. I look at old photos—the thinness, the sunglasses, a shell—and admit I looked like a junkie (which I was, I guess). That zest, that makes you rise up and every night go; that freedom, that stress, that hysterical, unnatural strength, nothing compares; count the heads, the tickets, the money, the shots lined up on the bar, find the keys for the back entrance, for the car, feeling in, feeling out of sorts all the time, in that well-known trance, how bad it was for me and, God, how much I miss it.

I drum on my desk as I type this, there’s no outgrowing it. Don’t turn around your gypsy heart, for sure, you choose life, you’re not a vampire, you’re a big girl now, you’re mature. But it’s there, that wildness, nothing’s happened to it, the earth hasn’t flattened to it, it comes to thrum every night, builds like a rhythm section into works of entrepreneurship and writing and affairs of passion, the wiring that connects life’s stage and the backstage where all the action unfolds; it’s untiring.

Some people I want to speak to for years, I have time to chest up all that I would say, and we read, respond, ask questions from time to time, and the rest, the rest feels like it’s silence.

The widths of the world are stretches of silence, it’s not space but time; I prevail sometimes hurt, sometimes hopeful, mostly forgetful. And somewhere someone waits the same way for my answer, and my scatterbrain outbox feels like betrayal, like silence.

And on some nights I choke with all this wordlessness, that I could but I can’t speak my mind or, when it’s my turn, listen. There’s a distance between texts here and I do mind, a crisis of exegesis, the syntaxes wish to be intertwined; I either say everything or else it is silence. When the world falls open it can also fall silent. Now it’s night over here and we wait for our turn to talk.