Apr 11·edited Apr 11Liked by sympathetic opposition
I re-read the Lady of Shallott recently and also saw a tragic e-girl angle to it.
Before the mirror cracks, she is kind of emotionally dulled. She's not unhappy, really, but living a limited emotional existence. "She lives with little joy or fear," but through the weaving the mirror image, she experiences bursts of excitement. ("But in her web she still delights / To weave the mirror's magic sights.") This isn't joy, but some other kind of incomplete pleasure that leaves her perpetually underfufilled. This is all that she seems to be driven by: "no other care hath she."
The Lady of Shallott archetype seems more like a girl who is in an environment where she is coasting through her emotions by getting basic psychological needs met, but not able to progress past that. This reminds me of people who spend years of their lives being entertained by the Internet, especially through lurking and other parasocial activities, who eventually feel as though they have little to show for it. Instead of building skills, relationships, etc., they feel like they just drifted through time without progress.
The cracking of the mirror is the culmination of her fomo. The mirror (half-existing on the Internet) no longer feels gratifying, but integration into the real world feels unfathomable.
I don't know what Tennyson's original idea was here. There's an alternative take on the "blissful ignorance" of female domesticity (she is complacent while ignorant of her own lack of independence, and upon realizing how she is restrained, she cannot handle the frustration). But I feel like the Lady of Shallott being absorbed into the emotional hibernation of a solitary Content Consumer seems to work for some reason.
I'm now re-reading this a few hours after first coming across it. I probably should have written a comment then, when the associations were still fresh.
First, this is probably not what you meant by literarily ambitious stories, but what came to my mind immediately when I read that phrase is the almost-a-genre of fanfiction that's broadly a modern AU where one or more of the characters are writers/involved with the literary world somehow. They're usually quite meta. Examples:
(Also, I remember you mentioning a writing workshop? What might qualify one to join?)
Your essay, and some of the stories referred in it, resonated with me a lot. I'm not entirely sure I know why. Maybe it's because I've been scouring the internet for comprehensible-to-me information on social dynamics, and I've noticed that once I find a writer in that domain, one of the things I'll do relatively quickly is try to find a picture of them, to figure out how attractive they are. I'm not sure how accurate that perception is, but it seems like an important piece of information to conceptualize someone's opinion on social stuff. Maybe that's just my recent preoccupation with the subject though (I fixed a chronic health problem I didn't know I had, got a bit more attractive as a result, and am struggling to update my social scripts).
Wrt being unfacedoxxed, I suppose not having the information about someone's attractiveness status creates space for people's assumptions and projections, letting the veiled person experience a different dynamic than the one they're normally privy to. Growth experience, "walking a mile in someone else's shoes", maybe?
Relatedly, it's been observed that being (very) attractive isn't always an advantage. I think it was Simone and Malcolm Collins who pointed out that having an attractive girlfriend is such a source of validation for teenage boys/young men, they're unlikely to risk losing the relationship if she engages in suboptimal behaviour. Which might not be good conditioning for the woman.
In this context, the veil trope might be a narrative device to have a beautiful character that also has virtues one might learn growing up without the advantage of good looks? (Humility, kindness,...,?) (I'm not sure I'm explaining this well.) (An alternative device would be to come up with a plausible reason why she grew up ugly, or similar - an unattractive person has to learn how to be likeable without people being primed to like them.)
One thing I'm having trouble parsing is the warrior/malebrainedness thing. Like, is being seen as attractive woman a hindrance to achievement in masculine domains? (I don't trust my observations on this.) One alternative hypothesis I can come up with (not sure if I agree with it) is that it might be a male (malebrained person's) fantasy of having a partner they don't have to struggle to understand (not femalebrained) but who [strikethrough] has boobs [/strikethrough] possesses feminine beauty.
Anyway, thank you very much for writing this, it's definitely food for thought!
>First, this is probably not what you meant by literarily ambitious stories, but what came to my mind immediately when I read that phrase is the almost-a-genre of fanfiction that's broadly a modern AU where one or more of the characters are writers/involved with the literary world somehow. They're usually quite meta.
good god i wont be able to stop thinking about this. there's something very poignant there & relatable, the writer's fantasy of being a writer
I would really push back on the idea of looking to stories for guidance. I actually think this is one of the most reliable ways to make your life worse. Fictional narratives are generally built to sell. That you should not trust them as guides is really obvious if you consider more extreme cases, like action movies and violent videogames. But even accounts of real events are highly suspect. There are billions of people on the earth, and a small sample of their true stories will ever reach you: generally by riding a popularity vector. Which ones spread? Well, the ones that conform to the same requirements as the ones that are built to sell: they're naturally selected. Usually this is stuff that's unusual, dramatic and conflict-ridden. These are not often associated with good outcomes! Stories tend to be effective for transmitting a host of information and feelings, and they are great to study in order to learn how to entertain and communicate but they are really bad for guidance on life-living. This is particularly true of some of the authors whose works you profiled. Tennyson pretty clearly had a lot of problems with women based on like, everything he wrote, and both Shakespeare and his children had unhappy marriages.
I think a much better source is the lives and decisions of your friends, family and acquaintances. Those stories have some bias, but often the bias is in favor of their applicability to your life: these people tend to be similar enough to you that you can often draw conclusions from their choices and consequences. You also tend to get a lot of longitudinal information, and with older relatives and friends you get to see how stuff played out. Where this method has a lot of problems is if most of your social circle is people whose outcomes are bad. In that situation I'd recommend trying to find and associate with a new social circle.
You have actually experienced this yourself in your account of not wanting to sell cookies because of the "jesus said don't turn the church into a marketplace" thing. The story was just not a very good guide; but the guidance from the social circle was much better in terms of your personal outcomes.
I think that historically, this is how people have actually behaved: not by using stories as a guidepost, but by using much more local information. I think the stories tended to serve other purposes.
i do think that whatever the purposes are, looking for catharsis or whatever, there's still something seriously missing in structurally the same way when you lack satisfying/resonant stories about what you're doing
I mean there are a lot. Think about the purposes that religious stories serve. Just having a universally-adopted body of stories can be a powerful unifying force for a community or culture. Providing entertainment is also just a really big deal. When you don't like your job, but you have to do it in order to live, getting to laugh or smile or just escape at the end of the day can have a really big impact. Stories tend to be pretty powerful communicative and marketing tools: if you want to spread an idea, embedding it into a good story is a pretty effective strategy; I mean that's the basis of all TV advertising right? To say nothing of shows developed to sell toys.
Could you expand what you mean when you say "stories about what you're doing". What thing that you're doing are you really looking for stories about? Presumably not breathing or sleeping. Just communicating with people anonymously, like you discuss in the post?
I often toy with insisting that stories as such are bad, and the ones we consider 'good' are just the worst and most anti-human. Arguably the only blessed thing about modernity is the lack of any meaningfully 'good' stories about it.
I don't read stories anymore. Apparently I still read essays about them.
A brief but perhaps not-very-illuminating example is the most famous one from Joseph Henrich's "The Secret to Our Success" about evolved tech: preparing (some varieties of) manioc (cassava) in such a way that it does not contain any cyanide. The cyanide is in very low concentrations, and causes problems only after decades. And yet, manioc-growing populations evolved ways of preparing it that are safe, despite the feedback loop being sized in the span of a whole human generation.
Now, ask any successful manioc-preparer to tell you a story about why she prepares it the way she does. The story will be hot garbage, a kind of negative information -- you'd know more about manioc if you watched her in silence, and copied what she is doing. This is the way we became human in the first place -- telling stories is much newer, lossier, and misleading-er.
the story she tells you wouldnt be true, but if it makes you more likely to wash your cassava, it still functions/works, right? i think that is one reason i want the stories to be old & not new, so that whether the stories are true or not (& fiction obviously isnt) you know the stories are coming from people that made it work
Apr 11·edited Apr 11Liked by sympathetic opposition
I feel like this is the evolution fallacy.
Sickle-cell anemia (you probably learned about this in high school) is a genetic mutation that kills like ~25% of the population that has it, but two thirds of those that it does not kill get substantial resistance to malaria. It turns out that malaria, unresisted, will kill more than 25% of your population (kind of by a lot in fact) that this is a positive trade. But it's not like, a good trade, and it's something I like to bring up when people mistakenly talk about evolution making people better. Evolution makes people fit a particular environment better, but often only in a very marginal way.
The actual modern solution to malaria was first quinine, and then much better anti-malarial drugs. These are LOADS better than sickle-cell. Quinine has some nasty side effects, but it definitely does not kill a quarter of people who take it. The modern medicines basically have no downside except that you have to take a pill every day for a month-ish.
When you say you want the old stories because they came from people that made it work, it reads to me a lot like a preference for sickle-cell anemia. That made it work too. I think also that this is the objection Leo is making: that stories were kind of ok when we didn't have anything better, but that they really should not be our first choice of how to approach problems now. I'd draw a parallel to old-style Christianity in Europe. The church had a lot of advantages over what came before it, and managed to preserve a lot of knowledge and do a lot of good. But it's just kind of worse than science and democracy. Stories, traditions and religions are great when you don't have science and democracy, or when you can't really have them because your population is a bunch of illiterate farmers. But once you have access to the better thing you should probably use it to organize your society and figure out your life, and let stories be used for other stuff.
But also, like, I'm not sure the "old stories make it work and new ones do not, or are more likely to not" argument even hits. Is it really that difficult to evaluate the efficacy of new stories? Is the average performance of new stories, even without evaluation, actually worse than the performance of old ones? I mean there are a lot of really badly-performing old stories. Like Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault and Leviticus still have large followings and they are not great!
Apr 12·edited Apr 12Liked by sympathetic opposition
No, the story would be paper-thin and risible, and you would conclude she was a superstitious old know-nothing. You'd prepare your manioc the easier way, and your children would be sickly in middle age. Stories are a response to someone asking a question about something they'd have been better off not questioning. Again, in ancestral time. As Jay says in his response, we now have other ways of exploring things.
Now, there is a way in which old stories help understand where people before the story went wrong. It's an archaeological process, and the story is like the burnt bits of charcoal in a dig that helps you date the actual find. Take for instance Jung in the american southwest. Nobody will tell him the story of why the men all go somewhere at dawn in silence. He guesses what it is, and confronts someone with it matter-of-factly. The shock on the poor man's face confirms it: their ritual makes the sun come up, and without their efforts it wouldn't. This story of theirs might seem a delightful myth, but it likely is more the bloody track through the underbrush where the genuine worship dragged itself to die. What came before the story was someone asking "why?". What preceded this impious question was the worship of the rising sun, a ritual not merely ancient but older than humanity. Not only our brethren among the great apes but all diurnal creatures rejoice when our father cheers us with his face every blessed morning, ages without end. And we traded that for a myth so flimsy it could not last the night.
So. What is this that I have written? To me, like a fond parent, it feels like prose poetry. I laid it on too thickly with that bit about our father's face. No doubt I'm remembering my Gerard Manly Hopkins. It's probably just a very short and somewhat poor essay. But for sure it isn't a story. I could write one, perhaps about a little girl who is left out of her tribe's no-girls-allowed morning worship and follows them and is caught and cast out and goes on a quest to discover the sun's home and eventually comes back bearing astronomical wisdom and they beg her forgiveness. Maybe she goes blind in the process and is led back by a female stag (sic) in whose antlers in dream she sees hang the sun and moon and host of stars. If such a story existed and was old, it would be a fun archaeological exercise, I suppose. If I wrote it now it would be a grim and sardonic imitation of Kipling's little girl who invented the alphabet, likely full of fourth-wall breaks and a joke about sex.
I thought the point was that the stories of the older people around us are now out of date in many of the details. There's the old meme of "look em in the eye and give em a firm handshake" type advice, I think there's a lot of stuff like that, only more subtle. For example, any young adult asking their parents how they met and fell in love, they might have trouble applying the story to their own life, aside from the really high level takeaways.
Things change fast these days. I think you could pause technology right now and there would still be years of people figuring out how to best use it. And if technological development is *accelerating*, it may well outpace the ability of humans to understand it. So yeah, let's all hang out and be confused
Apr 13·edited Apr 13Liked by sympathetic opposition
Do they really change that fast, though? Have things really changed that much? I think people overrate the extent to which nowadays is different, as captured elegantly by this: xkcd.com/1227
I think stories are an inferior guide, for the reasons I outlined; but I don't think old advice is worse. I've read a lot of old nonfiction that has served me reliably and well. Yes, some things are wrong or out-of-date, but often new ideas, when tested, fail. "Look them in the eye and give them a firm handshake" is not bad advice. It's certainly not enough by itself to achieve financial success, but you can do a lot worse than eye contact and a handshake that is neither bone-crushing nor limp.
I will agree that there is a paucity of good romantic advice but I am doubtful that this is a problem of the old advice being out of date. It was, for a long period, completely normal for family life, and school life for that matter, to be about stronger people beating weaker people in order to control them. Advice from such an environment didn't spoil: it was never fresh.
I re-read the Lady of Shallott recently and also saw a tragic e-girl angle to it.
Before the mirror cracks, she is kind of emotionally dulled. She's not unhappy, really, but living a limited emotional existence. "She lives with little joy or fear," but through the weaving the mirror image, she experiences bursts of excitement. ("But in her web she still delights / To weave the mirror's magic sights.") This isn't joy, but some other kind of incomplete pleasure that leaves her perpetually underfufilled. This is all that she seems to be driven by: "no other care hath she."
The Lady of Shallott archetype seems more like a girl who is in an environment where she is coasting through her emotions by getting basic psychological needs met, but not able to progress past that. This reminds me of people who spend years of their lives being entertained by the Internet, especially through lurking and other parasocial activities, who eventually feel as though they have little to show for it. Instead of building skills, relationships, etc., they feel like they just drifted through time without progress.
The cracking of the mirror is the culmination of her fomo. The mirror (half-existing on the Internet) no longer feels gratifying, but integration into the real world feels unfathomable.
I don't know what Tennyson's original idea was here. There's an alternative take on the "blissful ignorance" of female domesticity (she is complacent while ignorant of her own lack of independence, and upon realizing how she is restrained, she cannot handle the frustration). But I feel like the Lady of Shallott being absorbed into the emotional hibernation of a solitary Content Consumer seems to work for some reason.
I'm now re-reading this a few hours after first coming across it. I probably should have written a comment then, when the associations were still fresh.
First, this is probably not what you meant by literarily ambitious stories, but what came to my mind immediately when I read that phrase is the almost-a-genre of fanfiction that's broadly a modern AU where one or more of the characters are writers/involved with the literary world somehow. They're usually quite meta. Examples:
Les Misérables:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/1060639/chapters/2126196
Merlin:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/387876 (AO3 account required)
Supernatural:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/18083927/chapters/42744872
I, uh, have read all of those far too many times.
(Also, I remember you mentioning a writing workshop? What might qualify one to join?)
Your essay, and some of the stories referred in it, resonated with me a lot. I'm not entirely sure I know why. Maybe it's because I've been scouring the internet for comprehensible-to-me information on social dynamics, and I've noticed that once I find a writer in that domain, one of the things I'll do relatively quickly is try to find a picture of them, to figure out how attractive they are. I'm not sure how accurate that perception is, but it seems like an important piece of information to conceptualize someone's opinion on social stuff. Maybe that's just my recent preoccupation with the subject though (I fixed a chronic health problem I didn't know I had, got a bit more attractive as a result, and am struggling to update my social scripts).
Wrt being unfacedoxxed, I suppose not having the information about someone's attractiveness status creates space for people's assumptions and projections, letting the veiled person experience a different dynamic than the one they're normally privy to. Growth experience, "walking a mile in someone else's shoes", maybe?
Relatedly, it's been observed that being (very) attractive isn't always an advantage. I think it was Simone and Malcolm Collins who pointed out that having an attractive girlfriend is such a source of validation for teenage boys/young men, they're unlikely to risk losing the relationship if she engages in suboptimal behaviour. Which might not be good conditioning for the woman.
In this context, the veil trope might be a narrative device to have a beautiful character that also has virtues one might learn growing up without the advantage of good looks? (Humility, kindness,...,?) (I'm not sure I'm explaining this well.) (An alternative device would be to come up with a plausible reason why she grew up ugly, or similar - an unattractive person has to learn how to be likeable without people being primed to like them.)
One thing I'm having trouble parsing is the warrior/malebrainedness thing. Like, is being seen as attractive woman a hindrance to achievement in masculine domains? (I don't trust my observations on this.) One alternative hypothesis I can come up with (not sure if I agree with it) is that it might be a male (malebrained person's) fantasy of having a partner they don't have to struggle to understand (not femalebrained) but who [strikethrough] has boobs [/strikethrough] possesses feminine beauty.
Anyway, thank you very much for writing this, it's definitely food for thought!
>First, this is probably not what you meant by literarily ambitious stories, but what came to my mind immediately when I read that phrase is the almost-a-genre of fanfiction that's broadly a modern AU where one or more of the characters are writers/involved with the literary world somehow. They're usually quite meta.
good god i wont be able to stop thinking about this. there's something very poignant there & relatable, the writer's fantasy of being a writer
glad I'm not alone :)
I would really push back on the idea of looking to stories for guidance. I actually think this is one of the most reliable ways to make your life worse. Fictional narratives are generally built to sell. That you should not trust them as guides is really obvious if you consider more extreme cases, like action movies and violent videogames. But even accounts of real events are highly suspect. There are billions of people on the earth, and a small sample of their true stories will ever reach you: generally by riding a popularity vector. Which ones spread? Well, the ones that conform to the same requirements as the ones that are built to sell: they're naturally selected. Usually this is stuff that's unusual, dramatic and conflict-ridden. These are not often associated with good outcomes! Stories tend to be effective for transmitting a host of information and feelings, and they are great to study in order to learn how to entertain and communicate but they are really bad for guidance on life-living. This is particularly true of some of the authors whose works you profiled. Tennyson pretty clearly had a lot of problems with women based on like, everything he wrote, and both Shakespeare and his children had unhappy marriages.
I think a much better source is the lives and decisions of your friends, family and acquaintances. Those stories have some bias, but often the bias is in favor of their applicability to your life: these people tend to be similar enough to you that you can often draw conclusions from their choices and consequences. You also tend to get a lot of longitudinal information, and with older relatives and friends you get to see how stuff played out. Where this method has a lot of problems is if most of your social circle is people whose outcomes are bad. In that situation I'd recommend trying to find and associate with a new social circle.
You have actually experienced this yourself in your account of not wanting to sell cookies because of the "jesus said don't turn the church into a marketplace" thing. The story was just not a very good guide; but the guidance from the social circle was much better in terms of your personal outcomes.
I think that historically, this is how people have actually behaved: not by using stories as a guidepost, but by using much more local information. I think the stories tended to serve other purposes.
hm, what other purposes?
i do think that whatever the purposes are, looking for catharsis or whatever, there's still something seriously missing in structurally the same way when you lack satisfying/resonant stories about what you're doing
I mean there are a lot. Think about the purposes that religious stories serve. Just having a universally-adopted body of stories can be a powerful unifying force for a community or culture. Providing entertainment is also just a really big deal. When you don't like your job, but you have to do it in order to live, getting to laugh or smile or just escape at the end of the day can have a really big impact. Stories tend to be pretty powerful communicative and marketing tools: if you want to spread an idea, embedding it into a good story is a pretty effective strategy; I mean that's the basis of all TV advertising right? To say nothing of shows developed to sell toys.
Could you expand what you mean when you say "stories about what you're doing". What thing that you're doing are you really looking for stories about? Presumably not breathing or sleeping. Just communicating with people anonymously, like you discuss in the post?
if i can explain it, which, maybe not, i will probably do so at length in a post
I often toy with insisting that stories as such are bad, and the ones we consider 'good' are just the worst and most anti-human. Arguably the only blessed thing about modernity is the lack of any meaningfully 'good' stories about it.
I don't read stories anymore. Apparently I still read essays about them.
why are stories bad???
A brief but perhaps not-very-illuminating example is the most famous one from Joseph Henrich's "The Secret to Our Success" about evolved tech: preparing (some varieties of) manioc (cassava) in such a way that it does not contain any cyanide. The cyanide is in very low concentrations, and causes problems only after decades. And yet, manioc-growing populations evolved ways of preparing it that are safe, despite the feedback loop being sized in the span of a whole human generation.
Now, ask any successful manioc-preparer to tell you a story about why she prepares it the way she does. The story will be hot garbage, a kind of negative information -- you'd know more about manioc if you watched her in silence, and copied what she is doing. This is the way we became human in the first place -- telling stories is much newer, lossier, and misleading-er.
the story she tells you wouldnt be true, but if it makes you more likely to wash your cassava, it still functions/works, right? i think that is one reason i want the stories to be old & not new, so that whether the stories are true or not (& fiction obviously isnt) you know the stories are coming from people that made it work
I feel like this is the evolution fallacy.
Sickle-cell anemia (you probably learned about this in high school) is a genetic mutation that kills like ~25% of the population that has it, but two thirds of those that it does not kill get substantial resistance to malaria. It turns out that malaria, unresisted, will kill more than 25% of your population (kind of by a lot in fact) that this is a positive trade. But it's not like, a good trade, and it's something I like to bring up when people mistakenly talk about evolution making people better. Evolution makes people fit a particular environment better, but often only in a very marginal way.
The actual modern solution to malaria was first quinine, and then much better anti-malarial drugs. These are LOADS better than sickle-cell. Quinine has some nasty side effects, but it definitely does not kill a quarter of people who take it. The modern medicines basically have no downside except that you have to take a pill every day for a month-ish.
When you say you want the old stories because they came from people that made it work, it reads to me a lot like a preference for sickle-cell anemia. That made it work too. I think also that this is the objection Leo is making: that stories were kind of ok when we didn't have anything better, but that they really should not be our first choice of how to approach problems now. I'd draw a parallel to old-style Christianity in Europe. The church had a lot of advantages over what came before it, and managed to preserve a lot of knowledge and do a lot of good. But it's just kind of worse than science and democracy. Stories, traditions and religions are great when you don't have science and democracy, or when you can't really have them because your population is a bunch of illiterate farmers. But once you have access to the better thing you should probably use it to organize your society and figure out your life, and let stories be used for other stuff.
But also, like, I'm not sure the "old stories make it work and new ones do not, or are more likely to not" argument even hits. Is it really that difficult to evaluate the efficacy of new stories? Is the average performance of new stories, even without evaluation, actually worse than the performance of old ones? I mean there are a lot of really badly-performing old stories. Like Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault and Leviticus still have large followings and they are not great!
No, the story would be paper-thin and risible, and you would conclude she was a superstitious old know-nothing. You'd prepare your manioc the easier way, and your children would be sickly in middle age. Stories are a response to someone asking a question about something they'd have been better off not questioning. Again, in ancestral time. As Jay says in his response, we now have other ways of exploring things.
Now, there is a way in which old stories help understand where people before the story went wrong. It's an archaeological process, and the story is like the burnt bits of charcoal in a dig that helps you date the actual find. Take for instance Jung in the american southwest. Nobody will tell him the story of why the men all go somewhere at dawn in silence. He guesses what it is, and confronts someone with it matter-of-factly. The shock on the poor man's face confirms it: their ritual makes the sun come up, and without their efforts it wouldn't. This story of theirs might seem a delightful myth, but it likely is more the bloody track through the underbrush where the genuine worship dragged itself to die. What came before the story was someone asking "why?". What preceded this impious question was the worship of the rising sun, a ritual not merely ancient but older than humanity. Not only our brethren among the great apes but all diurnal creatures rejoice when our father cheers us with his face every blessed morning, ages without end. And we traded that for a myth so flimsy it could not last the night.
So. What is this that I have written? To me, like a fond parent, it feels like prose poetry. I laid it on too thickly with that bit about our father's face. No doubt I'm remembering my Gerard Manly Hopkins. It's probably just a very short and somewhat poor essay. But for sure it isn't a story. I could write one, perhaps about a little girl who is left out of her tribe's no-girls-allowed morning worship and follows them and is caught and cast out and goes on a quest to discover the sun's home and eventually comes back bearing astronomical wisdom and they beg her forgiveness. Maybe she goes blind in the process and is led back by a female stag (sic) in whose antlers in dream she sees hang the sun and moon and host of stars. If such a story existed and was old, it would be a fun archaeological exercise, I suppose. If I wrote it now it would be a grim and sardonic imitation of Kipling's little girl who invented the alphabet, likely full of fourth-wall breaks and a joke about sex.
I thought the point was that the stories of the older people around us are now out of date in many of the details. There's the old meme of "look em in the eye and give em a firm handshake" type advice, I think there's a lot of stuff like that, only more subtle. For example, any young adult asking their parents how they met and fell in love, they might have trouble applying the story to their own life, aside from the really high level takeaways.
Things change fast these days. I think you could pause technology right now and there would still be years of people figuring out how to best use it. And if technological development is *accelerating*, it may well outpace the ability of humans to understand it. So yeah, let's all hang out and be confused
Do they really change that fast, though? Have things really changed that much? I think people overrate the extent to which nowadays is different, as captured elegantly by this: xkcd.com/1227
I think stories are an inferior guide, for the reasons I outlined; but I don't think old advice is worse. I've read a lot of old nonfiction that has served me reliably and well. Yes, some things are wrong or out-of-date, but often new ideas, when tested, fail. "Look them in the eye and give them a firm handshake" is not bad advice. It's certainly not enough by itself to achieve financial success, but you can do a lot worse than eye contact and a handshake that is neither bone-crushing nor limp.
I will agree that there is a paucity of good romantic advice but I am doubtful that this is a problem of the old advice being out of date. It was, for a long period, completely normal for family life, and school life for that matter, to be about stronger people beating weaker people in order to control them. Advice from such an environment didn't spoil: it was never fresh.
well, i clearly dont think its changed too much for it to be impossible to read old stories
i'm also not like looking for advice in them (which it seems like would be more of a problem w nonfiction right?) im looking for resonance
What do you mean by resonance?
whatever makes me get obsessed enough with a story that nothing feels better than reading into it too much like these ones
I understand entirely.