Thoughts on Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

I’m not calling this one a review because it’s a little less organized and might work better if you’ve already read the book. Still, it’s spoiler-free.

I recently finished reading Brave New World with some friends, and one of the things that stood out to me was the difficulty I had mapping the ideas onto contemporary politics. It seems like almost all media these days can be neatly collapsed into one of a few political ideologies. It’s clear, often before you even read/watch it, if a modern story is pro-trans or anti-vaccines or whatever, and such positions are generally accepted as indicating a standard package of other beliefs, typically “liberal” or “conservative.” People might sometimes miss the point (the shameful kerfuffle around “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” comes to mind) but the pattern remains.

There’s probably an urge to blame such clearly blatant politics on declining media literacy, or political polarization, or some other buzzy trend1. And maybe that’s what’s happening. But I lack the historical knowledge to know if this is actually new phenomenon. Maybe people have always been pretty blatant about the politics that motivate their art. (Otherwise, why would you bother writing something political in the first place?) If that’s the case, one way we can expand our thinking is to read political works from other eras, when different ideas were in play and those ideas were grouped together differently.

This certainly seems to apply to Brave New World. In the unlikely event you’ve never heard of it before, Brave New World is a dystopian novel by Aldous Huxley that imagines a highly controlled future society that emphasizes stability, consumerism, and immediate gratification. In some ways, Huxley’s imagined world is clearly based on contemporary liberal criticisms. The logic of Henry Ford’s assembly line has been elevated to a religion. Consumerism is rampant (e.g. citizens are subliminally conditioned to buy new clothes instead of repairing old ones). Most obviously, notions of personal liberty are almost completely absent from this version of the future. On the other hand, this brave new world also bears clear resemblance to more conservative anxieties. Christianity has been abolished and virtually forgotten, to Huxley’s apparent vexation. Monogamy is also a thing of the past, and casual sex is shown to be harmful (at least for people from other cultures).

Adding to this confusion is the willy-nilly way Huxley drops references. Two of the main characters are named Marx and Lenin(a), and I spent much of the book trying to puzzle out their connection to communism. There’s an off-handed mention of a character named Bakunin, but no further reference to the anarchist philosophy traditionally associated with that name. Some characters’ names are double-barreled references, and sometimes these make some sense. The improbably named Helmholtz Watson is a reference to two foundational psychologists, the latter of whom has his most famous experiment clearly referenced in the book (though this part of the book has nothing to do with the character of Helmholtz Watson). Other times these dual reference seem more like Mad Libs, as in the cases of Benito Hoover and Darwin Bonaparte.

A friend suggested that there’s no one-to-one between characters and their namesakes. Instead, the namedrops as a whole are meant to point to the ideas and trends that were on Huxley’s mind as he was writing. I think that’s probably right. But I’m less inclined to interpret Huxley’s melange of dystopian tropes as neutral observation. I think he was pointing to elements in society he disliked and showing the consequences of leaving those elements unchecked. (Reading about the history of the book on Wikipedia seems to support my idea.)

So reading this book challenged me, in a way I appreciated. I had to actually reflect on my own ideas in depth, instead of mentally stamping the whole book with “Agree” or “Disagree.” I was impressed with the way Huxley predicted the neoliberal drive for a frictionless workforce, and I appreciated his criticisms2. At the same time, I balked at his yearning for widespread, chaste monogamy. Huxley doesn’t resort to strawmen. Near the end of the book a character gives an articulate, persuasive defense of his society, pointing out that much of what others find objectionable boils down to different choices of what to value.

I was also impressed with aspects of Huxley’s world building. Helicopters hadn’t even been invented at the time he wrote the book, but he predicted they would be widely used in the future. (Which is true, even if we don’t have personal helicopters in the way he predicted). Cheap, narcotic entertainment (including pornography), a major element of Huxley’s new world, has also come to pass. His idea of causing a zygote to “bud” into many identical clones is couched in plausible terms, and his treatment of artificial gestation has more lately been taken up by authors as influential as Lois McMaster Bujold. Finally, the audiobook I listened to was read by Michael York, and his narration did an incredible job driving home the wit in Huxley’s words.

  1. I use the term “blame” because I think lots of people, including myself, assume that such blatancy is a bad thing. But maybe making clear political statements can be a good thing, for example when there is an urgent and high stakes problem. If this is true, levels of blatant political messaging is less likely to vary based on historical period and more likely to vary based on how important the author thinks their message is. ↩︎
  2. Brave New World is often compared to Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell, and the comparisons are often framed in terms of which author was more correct. It’s a fun game, but probably not the best way to think about the issue. However, I do want to highlight one thing I think Orwell observed that is lacking from Huxley’s work, namely, abuse of power. The “world controller” we meet in Brave New World is a quaint academic. He allows himself some indulgences forbidden to others (say, reading Shakespeare) but is sincerely committed to serving the population, whose values he shares. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the authorities are driven by power. They seem themselves as separate from, and above, the general population. They influence how the population thinks and acts not out of beneficence but purely to entrench their own status. In this aspect, I find Orwell much closer to the mark. ↩︎

March 17, 2026 Add Comment

Book Review: Rogue Moon, by Algis Budrys

I picked up Rogue Moon because of the following description on Wikipedia: “Rogue Moon is largely about the discovery and investigation of a large alien artifact found on the surface of the Moon. The object eventually kills its explorers in various ways”. The book ended up not quite living up to that description, but it was interesting nonetheless.

I found Budrys’ prose to be a bit difficult, for better and for worse. I got the sense he was really striving for something literary, carefully (and at times, slightly awkwardly) applying rules like the classic “show don’t tell.” A character’s emotions, for example, are often implied by how other characters react to them. He mostly succeeds in this attempt, which combines nicely with his efforts to explore the psychology of brilliant and complicated men (and one woman). But he often leaves the scenery under-described. Aside from the almost compulsive descriptions of each man’s face, I often could not picture a given scene, and I was sometimes briefly startled when a new character or device, apparently there the whole time, materialized into relevance. But as these things usually go, I got used to the style after 50 or so pages.

The story takes place in 1959. Satellite reconnaissance has revealed a strange structure on the surface of the moon. The US Navy recruits Dr. Edward Hawks to help them investigate. While manned space flight is still slightly out of reach, Dr. Hawks has been developing a transporter device that scans an object and flawlessly reconstructs it at a receiving station. One of these receiving stations is dropped on the moon, and people are sent up there to to explore the structure. The research team discovers that when humans are replicated, they can perceive what the other one is experiencing so long as they don’t have competing sensations. So the earth versions of the explorers are kept in sensory deprivation while their lunar counterparts investigate the the mysterious structure. Unfortunately, each of the explorers dies almost immediately upon entering the structure, and each of them in highly unusual ways. This has the unfortunate side effect of driving their earth counterparts insane.

So far that’s mostly like the description above, except that all of that takes place before the opening of the book. Budrys spends the vast majority of the short novel looking at the interactions between earthbound characters. Chief among these are the interactions between Hawks and rugged adventurer Al Barker. Barker is recruited to the project because he seems to court death, so maybe experiencing his duplicate dying won’t make him insane. Consistent with his attempts at literary style, Budrys seemed to have Big Things to say about death, but I mostly didn’t find them interesting. Anyway, Hawks and Barker get on like cats and dogs, and they’re surrounded by conniving, egotistical schemers.

Themes

Hyper-competent protagonist: It’s common for science fiction stories to have genius, athletic, heroic, hyper-competent protagonists. This is especially true from works by authors who spent time writing for pulp magazines, as Budrys did1. He doesn’t fully deconstruct that trope here, but he goes a lot further than many authors in suggesting that such protagonists might actually be pretty complicated under the hood.

Women as sexpots: When mid-century science fiction (written by men) noticed women at all, it was to portray them as sexual objects. In Rogue Moon, Al Barker has a sexy and flirtatious girlfriend, Claire, who seems like she’s constantly on the prowl. Lots of description is lavished on her legs and hips and neck. But later in the book, Claire reveals she has insight to her histrionic behavior, but doesn’t know how to change it. She’s contrasted with Elizabeth, a woman who Hawks starts dating. Elizabeth is basically just a normal person (imagine that!). I don’t know that Rogue Moon gets a gold star for feminism, but it’s more nuanced than a lot of its contemporaries.

Danger Zone: Though this aspect of the book was less central than I would have liked, Rogue Moon seems important to the lineage of the “dangerous, unexplainable zone” trope. (That trope is more famously represented by stories like Roadside Picnic and Annihilation.) Hawks gives the following description, which I love:

“We don’t even know what to call that place. The eye won’t follow it, and photographs convey only the most fragile impression. There is reason to suspect it exists in more than three spatial dimensions. Nobody knows what it is, why it’s located there, what its true purpose might be, or what created it. We don’t know whether it’s animal, vegetable, or mineral. We don’t know whether it’s somehow natural, or artificial. We know, from the geology of several meteorite craters that have heaped rubble against its sides, that it’s been there for, at the very least, a million years. And we know what it does now: it kills people.”

At the end of Rogue Moon, we do get more detail about Barker navigating the labyrinth and the strange, seemingly arbitrary ways in which it kills him. It’s fascinating and spooky stuff.

Transporter Problem: The Transporter Problem, or “Teletransportation paradox” states that if a person could be teleported, it is not clear if the person coming out the ending teleporter is literally the same person who went into the starting teleporter, of if they are just an identical clone with the same memories2. This is often discussed in relation to Star Trek, and various philosophers have quipped they would never use Star Trek style transporters because it would effectively kill them and replace them with a doppelganger. Rogue Moon starts from assumption that the replica is *not* you, and uses that to ask questions about identity and death.

The book has enough interesting things to think about in its short span to be worthwhile. It just doesn’t scratch that spooky, cosmic horror adjacent itch I was hoping for.

  1. Rogue Moon actually started as a novella published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. ↩︎
  2. Of course, that’s begging the question a bit. Would an identical clone with the same memories automatically count as being the same person? That’s one of the layers to the thought experiment. ↩︎

March 15, 2026 Add Comment

Pulp Trivia

I’ve been reading a ton of Wikipedia articles about pulp authors for a writing project I assigned myself. I’ll share that project here when it’s done. But in the meantime I’ve come across a lot of fun trivia I want to share.

Jack Williamson was old enough to be born in Arizona Territory, and lived long enough to see some of his science fiction ideas pass into reality. He was one of the very first people to use the term “genetic engineering,” and he was the first science fiction writer to include ion thrusters in a story. He was an early science fiction writer to discuss antimatter (though he referred to it by its older name, contraterrene). And he coined the terms “psionics” and “terraforming”.

Williamson also has one of the best examples of failing upwards that I’ve ever seen. His novel Seetee Ship was negatively reviewed, including a line that said it “ranks only slightly above that of a comic strip adventure.” That review somehow got noticed by The New York Sunday News, which was looking for someone to write a new comic strip for them. They ended up hiring Williamson to write a loose adaptation of his poorly reviewed novel.

Edmond Hamilton wrote for pulp magazines and comic books. He wrote the Batman story that featured the now meme-famous panel of Batman slapping Robin.

(This wasn’t the original dialogue)

The first person to use the term “blaster” to refer to a sci-fi gun was named Nictzin Dyalhis. Or at least that might have been his name. Apparently he was an intensely private man and routinely lied about his biographical details, including on government forms.

The woman who invented dark fantasy, Gertrude Barrows Bennett, was widowed when her husband was caught in a tropical storm while on a treasure hunting expedition. It’s crazy to me that “professional treasure hunter” was a real job someone claimed in 1910. Anyway, Bennett turned to writing as one means of supporting herself and her children, and became very influential in the process. She is probably the first female American author to publish science fiction under her own name.

Bennett is the first (American, female, science fiction) author to publish under her own name because she published a single story in 1904 as G. M. Barrows, which was her name at the time. However, her gender wasn’t revealed until four years after her death, and she spent most of her career writing under the pseudonym Francis Stevens. The first female science fiction author to consistently publish under her own name was Clare Winger Harris.

Greye La Spina was another early female pulp writer. Apparently at her peak she was even more famous than H. P. Lovecraft.

February 3, 2026 Add Comment

Folklore

A boy was trying to find a way to deal with bullies at school. He asked his grandfather for advice. His grandfather stated, “Inside you are two wolves.” He paused for a long time, staring off into the middle distance. Just as the boy was about to ask a follow up question, the grandfather continued. “One of them always tells the truth. The other has four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs at night.”

The boy blinked. “What?”

“And when he woke up, his pillow was gone! He- he needed to something to eat the pillow in his tummy. Luckily, the big bad wolf knew that twelve spiders per year would wander into his mouth while he was sleeping. But how could he fall asleep without a pillow? He used one simple trick (doctors hate him!). He waited until midnight and said Bloody Mary into a mirror three times. Then the ghost gave him liquor that made him fall asleep for 20 years. Which was confusing, because he didn’t even notice the American revolution. But a magic frog gave him true love’s kiss, allowing the wolf to wake up. The wolf was now a prince, and he had to go rescue three little pigs. He and the frog tried to cross a river, but there was already a bag of corn on the boat. So the frog swam across the river with the prince on his back. But a scorpion stung both of them halfway across, and they both died.”

The grandfather stared into space again, then said “The moral of the story is that scorpions don’t really live in rivers.” And the boy was enlightened.

(With thanks to my friend JD, who provided the germ that spawned this vignette)

January 18, 2026 Add Comment

Book Review: Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto, by Tricia Hersey

Tricia Hersey’s book Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto is one of those books that could have been a blog post… almost. Her urgent and important thesis statement is that downtime is essential to human flourishing, and that capitalism systematically opposes both the downtime and the flourishing. But many of her supporting points and implications of her thesis are left undeveloped. This leaves a lot of space for Hersey to restate her main idea with slight changes in phrasing1. I got the sense her message would have been better suited to a smaller format. Except you could probably argue (and I’d probably believe) that this repetition serves to reinforce her point that learning to rest, or “deprogramming from grind culture” as she puts it, will be a long, slow process.

The idea that rest is critical for human well-being is probably obvious when framed in terms of actual nocturnal sleep. But Hersey suggests, persuasively, that daydreaming, softness, napping, and inactivity are also extremely important. She justifies these ideas with appeals to religious faith, saying that human beings are divine. Naps, she says, are part of our birthright. By contrast, systems that deny our divinity (and our humanity) by treating us like machines are evil.

Hersey doesn’t make any attempt to redress her ideas for secular readers. (If you believe, as I do, that human life is intrinsically valuable then her ideas are pretty easy to take, regardless of your religion.) Her imagined audience appears to be people who already mostly agree with her, but who might have overlooked the importance of rest. In this way, calling her book a manifesto makes sense. It’s a statement of belief rather than a piece of persuasive writing.

That’s disappointing, because there are some ideas I wanted to see explored further. Hersey makes claims like “perfectionism… is a function of white supremacy” and “capitalism was created on plantations.” I’m open to the possibility that there are ways in which these claims are true. But there are also obvious ways in which they’re false, and without further clarification it’s hard to simply accept them and move on.

Hersey is keenly aware of the ways her ideas are likely to be commodified and de-politicized. At times she seems short on practical recommendations about how to incorporate rest. This is at least partially because, as she repeatedly emphasizes, rest is going to look different for everyone and learning how to do it will be lifelong process2. These canny predictions of how her message will be misused were some of the things I admired most about Hersey’s writing. In addition to the above, she entreats reads to keep racial justice at the center of the rest movement. She also clarifies that taking naps is absolutely not about returning to work with renewed energy. Napping and resting are things we do only for ourselves, not to become more productive for bosses.

Tricia Hersey’s book grew out of her work creating The Nap Ministry. Check out their website and read a few of their blog posts. If you still feel like you want more, maybe the book is helpful after all.

  1. These slight changes in phrasing can still be helpful. For most of the book, Hersey identifies the enemy of rest as jobs, capitalism, and “grind culture.” But a couple times she mentions to-do lists, e.g. ““I know that if I never check another item off my to-do list, I am still worthy.” This shift allowed me to apply her message to productivity mandates I put on myself, and not just those that come from outside. ↩︎
  2. At one point she does share a list of 20 suggestions of what “resting can look like.” I was immediately struck by how the list format departed from her thoughtful, generally poetic prose and instead felt like a shallow facebook meme (indeed, she says the list was shared hundreds of thousands of times on social media). ↩︎

December 11, 2025 Add Comment

Reading Bingo

At the beginning of this year my family and I decided to play reading bingo. We each submitted various prompts, and then they got sorted onto a bingo card. If we read a book that fulfills a prompt we get to check off that square. It’s fun!

We’re going to do it again in 2026, which means I need to come up with more prompts. Unfortunately my family has rejected a high number of my previous suggestions. Since I can’t do anything else with them, I decided to share them here.

  • A book with a robotic cat on the cover but it isn’t about a robotic cat
  • A book that nobody has ever read before, including the author
  • An English translation of the Voynich Manuscript
  • A book that a tree would like if a witch taught it to read but also cursed it with a short attention span
  • A cookbook, written in verse
  • A book about a woman who drinks a potion that shrinks her down to the size of a mouse and she fights a mouse and then she becomes queen of the mice
  • A book you can’t find in the Library of Babel
  • A line-by-line refutation of the bible, but not the religious bible
  • A book that will be published ten years from now
  • A book that would work moderately well as a pair of socks
  • A book with more authors than words
  • A book about a horse that destroys the universe, written by a guy who’s famous for making surreal GIFs

October 28, 2025 Add Comment

Why Anarchists Don’t Get Ulcers

It’s hard to avoid talking about the news these days. Objectively terrible things are happening across the United States (and in quite a few other places too). These huge, terrible events are shattered across a hundred million headlines, plastered across every megabite of the Internet, and drip fed to us each waking hour, ceaselessly. In marginally saner times, the Internet monster occasionally belches up something frivolous, like arguments about the color of a dress or definition of a sandwich. Maybe that’s still happening, but current events mean it’s easier than ever to have an all-cataclysm media diet.

I’ve been dealing with this by trying to get rooted in my local community. I’m extremely lucky to have a strong radical/leftist/anarchist community where I live, and they have lots of great direct action1 projects to get involved with. I’ve put some time and energy into the local bail fund. I might not be able to do anything about mass deportation, but I can play a direct role in helping local people get out of cages. It feels good.

While attending bail fund meetings, I started to notice something interesting. Even during the craziest, scariest headlines about Trump’s abuse of power, my friends at the bail fund stayed relatively calm. All of my other conversations and virtually all of my text message threads would be about the latest assault on democracy. After a while, it just became the expected thing to mention, even if just briefly. I might be doing “fine, thanks” but I should probably save a moment to mention how scary the rest of the country is. But the most radical people I knew didn’t seem to be following this script2.

From one perspective, this sangfroid from the anarchist set is surprising. Their vision of utopia is already significantly removed from the status quo; under Trump, things are changing such that the anarchist vision is even more distant. Rank and file Democrats might be upset about asylum seekers being thrown in detention camps, but anarchists should be upset about asylum seekers AND all other prisoners.

So why are some of the most radical among us also the best at taking current events in stride? I think there are probably two things that explain this phenomenon. First, I think lots of leftists already have a negative view of the status quo3. Indeed, the thing that often animates their politics is an acute awareness of widespread injustice. Like they said over at the wonderful Live Like the World is Dying podcast, “We’re moving from neoliberal hell to a fascist hell.” This isn’t an excuse to be smug, and the current situation is still bad in new and upsetting ways. Luckily, many of the things we need to do to respond to this fresh new hell are things that leftists are already doing.

This leads into the second point. Leftists (and perhaps anarchists in particular) are are experienced in building support structures that don’t rely on the government. Whether it’s feeding children, producing lifesaving medication, providing disaster relief, giving people Internet access, paving roads, or providing other services, people on the left have practiced myriad ways of supporting each other. Trump and co. decimating the federal government is very bad, for many reasons. But just because the FDA and FEMA aren’t doing their jobs doesn’t mean it’s impossible to get the services they provide.

Obviously anarchists do get ulcers. (The title of this post is just a riff on a Robert Sapolsky book.) This is a very stressful time for anyone who gives a shit about human suffering. There is some solace to be taken from the fact that lots and lots of people are already working on solutions. It’s not going to replace what’s being lost, not yet. But if you help, we can get a little closer.

  1. If you’re not familiar with the lingo, “direct action” basically means changing something yourself instead of asking someone else to change it. It generally excludes things things like writing to your representatives or holding demonstrations, and includes things like distributing food to people in need or walking members of marginalized groups to their cars at night. It’s more like “volunteering” than “protesting”. ↩︎
  2. I distinctly remember one of them greeting me with the standard “how are you doing?” I responded with something like “Ok, just trying to live with all the crazy stuff going on right now.” In my other interactions, that was an invitation for the other person to go “I know!” and then talk about all the headlines that were stressing them out. In this case, my bail fund friend just smiled politely and then moved on to the next topic. ↩︎
  3. I once joked with a friend that being anywhere left of center was a state of knowing bad news about the world. The more bad things you knew, the further left you were. ↩︎

October 15, 2025 Add Comment

Imagination is a Terrain of Struggle

I read this really nice post from the Prisons, Prose, & Protest blog about how important it is to practice imagining a better future.

It reminds me a bit of the “Reading Weird Fiction in An Age of Fascism” article I linked to a while back, in that both are about combining a particular, progressive mindset with creative speculation. Whereas the weird fiction article was more about identifying problems that currently exist, the PPP post is about dreaming out way past those problems. I think the latter is more important, if for no other reason than it’s done less often and so we need more of it.

I’ve been thinking recently on how I’m calmer about all the political shit currently happening than some people around me. What Trump et al. are doing is very, very bad, but it doesn’t have a huge impact on my day to day mental health. A TON of that can be chalked up to my privilege, but some is probably due to the fact that I run “cool” in general.

I want to bottle my equanimity and give it to others. I’ve thought about trying to write about my point of view, but I’m exactly the wrong person to do that. My cool emotional temperature is involuntary, which means I don’t have great insight into how to cultivate it.

But my engagement with imagination and hope is much more deliberate. I’ve noticed that utopian thinking can move me from feeling washed out or glum to feeling fired up. Maybe that’s something I can explore further, and potentially offer to others who are looking for help changing their mood.

September 25, 2025 Add Comment

Missing Technology

Via Ran Prieur (apologies, I don’t know how to link to specific posts on his site), this is a great story about how a particular kind of 3D printing technology using metals recently died and disappeared. There’s no mystery involved- it’s just that it’s a technical and specialized process and private companies threw the technology away so they wouldn’t be bogged down in their race for profits.

I find this a much more likely explanation for the observations underlying the Tartarian Empire conspiracy. That conspiracy, if you’re unfamiliar, says that roughly 150 years ago all the people who knew how to make ornate and decorative architecture died in some sort of secret apocalypse that was hidden from everyday people by governmental elites; now buildings are all flat and boring because we don’t have anyone left who knows how to do anything else.

The conspiracy is obviously false, and so vague that Hitchens’s razor probably says we don’t need to spend any effort debunking it. But luckily people have spent that effort anyway. Turns out architects and historians have been observing the causes behind changing aesthetic tastes for years. And we actually do have ornamented houses, it’s just that they’re less popular among the super wealthy.

So it certainly isn’t the case the a bunch of craftspeople disappeared off the face of the earth. But it’s still possible for hands-on experience to be lost. This sucks if you want want a particular kind of archway or glazed tile for your house, but it’s a much bigger issue when somebody needs to repair a bridge or even make sustainable building materials.

Relevant listicle: 11 Vernacular Building Techniques That Are Disappearing

August 24, 2025 Add Comment

Whence heaven and hell

Where do we get the capacity to imagine eternal paradise and eternal damnation, and why do these ideas have such resonance? For this post, I’m less interested in the cultural history of these ideas (which is certainly important if we want to develop a full understanding) and more interested in cognitive architecture.

Hell is easier for me to conceptualize. When I’m in pain, it’s all I can focus on. It’s very hard for me to step outside that pain and think “Next week I will feel better.” This is especially true of the “positive and active anguish” (to borrow William James’s term) of depression. Aaron Beck’s cognitive triad of depression says, in part, that when we’re depressed we feel like the future is hopeless and the bad times will last forever. Maybe the concept of the eternal suffering of hell resonates with people because we already have experience imaging that our suffering will go on forever1. I wonder if some of the theologians who helped shape our modern concept of hell struggled with depression.

On the other hand, happiness, pleasure, and joy all feel more fragile to me. I recently read Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar and this quote captures the notion very well:

Often in my life, in the throes of despair, of my husband’s abuse, I have
held the certainty of the damned, that sense of “everything is going to be
just this, this misery forever, till I die.” An irrepressible inescapable horror
stretching out infinitely in every direction. Tragic, that only terror feels that
way. That even in Roya’s and my impossibly good moments, I instinctively
knew to hold them, to store them inside myself like pockets of fat for the
lean seasons ahead.

Maybe we can reach into a moment of supreme contentment, seize it, and imagine stretching that moment into infinity. But something about my lived experience keeps such an image from resonating very much. Instead, I think it’s a different kind of imagination that gives the idea of heaven its power.

Over at Experimental History, Adam Mastroianni did some cool research that found that human beings might have a fundamental predisposition to imagining how things could be better. It seems we do this in all sorts of contexts, and we imagine things being better much more often than we imagine things being worse. Maybe heaven, then, is a place to put all of our imagined improvements. Or to put it another way, maybe ideas of a perfect paradise resonate with us because we’re fundamentally wired to imagine how things could be better- and what’s better than perfection?

I think there might actually be instances in which we trigger thoughts akin to heaven and hell at the same time. Imagine having a pity party for yourself where you dwell on all the things you wish were better about your life. The more you think about it, the more perfect this alternate life seems, but also the more out of reach. Things will never improve, because while you can see the alternative clearly in your head, you’ll never be able to get there. You’re doomed to continue your suffering for the rest of your days.

I don’t know the best way to wrap up this post, so let me direct you to the excellent but only tangentially related short story by Ted Chiang, Hell is the Absence of God.

  1. It helps to drive home how strong this cognitive tendency is when you consider that many people overcome pain and difficulty with a success rate approaching 100%. I’m currently not in any physical or emotional distress, which means that every single time I’ve imagined my suffering would go on forever, I was wrong. Despite that, I can basically guarantee I will despair about the future many more times in my life. ↩︎

August 14, 2025 Add Comment