A few weeks ago, I sat down to breakfast with an old friend. Among all of the bon mots, one anecdote stuck with me. A most annoying person to talk with about their new idea is the shallow enthusiast. This is the one who is so smitten with the idea he’s just run across, that he can’t help but talk about it, but he hasn’t thought about it at all, so his talk is essentially a referral to wherever he heard the idea. He can do nothing aside from direct you to the original person, perhaps with a quote, but always with a link, “just listen to this podcast.” The shallow enthusiast is forever telling you to listen to so-and-so’s podcast or quoting some writer at you or referring every question to a favored expert. I think of this person as an enthusiast of thought leaders, but not of thoughts. This person is into the thinker, not the idea. The sad truth is that one wonders whether the shallow enthusiast has actually thought things through or whether he’s only consumed the words enough to get excited and pass them along to you. You want to shake such a fellow: it’s all well and good to know how you came by your thoughts, but I want to know your thoughts—not someone else’s!A companion to the shallow enthusiast is the person whose sense of humor is expressed solely by playing clips of jokes delivered by comedians. A long time ago, right at the dawn of when phones could play YouTube videos, I encountered such a person. We were at a table of five or six, and, seeking humor as a route to bonhomie, when they discovered I hadn’t seen jokes from Jim Gaffigan or Brian Regan or some such “clean” comic, they stopped everything. Our man handed me his phone, cued to just the right clips, and the table sat in silence as I watched a comedian’s jokes. The situation was so weird that I couldn’t muster more than a chuckle for some now-classic jokes and neither could the rest of the table as they listened along. It would’ve been much more fun to make some jokes ourselves, even if they’d been ripped off from the real funny people. At least then we would’ve been laughing together.
It was from this same crew that I found example after example of the shallow enthusiast. It wasn’t that these people didn’t read or listen to talks, it’s that the most you could get from them was a recommendation to read this book or listen to that talk because it was about such-and-such a topic and was “so good.” When asked, directly, what they thought about the book or speaker, the adjectives didn’t amount to much more than “good” and their commentary stopped before it started: you couldn’t get them to tell you anything about what they thought. While avid readers and listeners, as thinkers they were simple acolytes. That says something about the authors, thinkers, the authority structure that offered them to us, but it also says something about the readers. In the years since and in circles far afield from that religious group, I’ve encountered these shallow enthusiasts seemingly everywhere.
Lately, the shallow enthusiasts are the people showing you the words they’ve wrung, more or less easily, from our latest computer programs. Just this morning, a usually informative, or at last entertaining, pundit produced an essay that, charitably, amounted to a compare/contrast of what some people managed to prompt their way into from DeepSeek, one of the lower-rent AI companies. As punditry, this missed any number of points, not the least of which is that there’s no “one response” from these non-deterministic computer programs. My point is that I care what Krista Tippett thinks, not about the words she made from a Claude: as delighted as she might be with the output, I’d rather hear why she’s delighted than the computer’s words. And it’d be ideal to hear about something she came up with herself! After all, I can prompt a Claude to produce all manner of nonsense myself. The only part of that sentence that would interest anyone would be what my prompts were (and, perhaps, why).
It takes a bit of work, though, to have your own thoughts. It takes more to have thoughts worth sharing. (You should see the pile of words on the floor for these few hundred that appear in your inboxes on Friday—and I’m not claiming these are worth anything!) To have your own thoughts is to go from now to elsewhere and back to now, having had some novel observation or moment of inspiration along the way. Even if you’re just reacting to someone else’s better thoughts, that work of reacting is uniquely yours. The work of being interesting could start with something as simple as coming up with an additional adjective after “so good” or, better, an explanation of why you found it good. More broadly, the sage brings us word from the other side of a line in the same way a foreign correspondent does: they’ve been somewhere we have not, and we eagerly hear what they bring to us. I’m not against AI for this any more than I’m against writing notes in the margins or talking to yourself (quietly!). If bandying your thoughts back and forth with a computer helps you to think them, then by all means. But we’ll already be more interested in the prompts you’ve made than the computer’s responses.
Stillness is another key. Busyness might bring you all kinds of detail from reading or research or wandering. But the breathless report of what you’ve just seen, its raw data, pales in importance to what you’ve polished it into. It’s upon consideration that patterns emerge. New ideas often emerge instantaneously after decades of preparation.
What does it take to make a meaningful contribution? Some combination of work, thinking, and stillness helps you see a pattern, make connections, and bring back to us an idea worth sharing. For the reading this week, I have three examples of this sort of thing.
From the Meghan O’Gieblyn piece:
The internet is not a place of order but a boundless abyss that erases the contours of individual hours, swallows entire days, and inundates our lives with a vague sense of possibility never quite realized, leaving us, in the end, with that low-grade spiritual exhaustion for which “decision fatigue” seems too weak a term. The Stoics called this feeling stultitia—“fickleness and boredom and a continual shifting of purpose,” as Seneca put it. It describes the never-ending hunger for novelty; the inability to stick to commitments; the will’s imprisonment by competing desires.
The amount of time it must've taken to deeply think about what Internet time does to us and to connect it to an ancient word from Senaca!
From the Hortense Calisher piece:
All the while his novels and stories swell with the most intimately proud mapping of his own country's topography, the people in it, on farm or shore, in town or temple, forever referentially hemmed in by whatever hills face where, and what weathers come from them. Behind all, always localized like another hill, is their ancestry.
I bought four books of a tetrarchy because of reviews of a man and his life's work like the one from Hortense Calisher. The tetralogy was described by Paul Theroux as "the most complete vision we have of Japan in the twentieth century." I aspire to be the sort of person who thinks deeply about something, puts in the time, and then is still enough to let some new idea or realization emerge. I hope these pieces nudge you in that same direction.
Of all the attempts to pinpoint the origin of modernity—an exercise of which modernity never tires—my favorite begins with medieval monks. According to this account, it was the Benedictines who came up with the idea that it was possible to do the same thing, at the same time, every day. Although time was still widely regarded as fluid and coterminous with eternity, the monastery was governed by the rhythms of that most modern instrument: the clock.
In 1958 I made a trip to Southeast Asia as a cultural export of our Government, which at the time had the idea that persons of my persuasion were significant. In Tokyo I spent an unofficial evening with Yukio Mishima, who came to my hotel with Tsutomu Shimamura, of Chuo Koron, a leading intellectual review. We got on; the memory must affect what I write here. But that alone does not entitle me to brood on his life and works. His death, however, was a public act and the work a public offering; the world is invited, commanded to brood.
A sea so flat it is a mirror, a portal, and here I am, on my paddleboard, floating in that great unblinking blue. No wind, the water thick and slow as paint pooling on a palette—a thousand shards of colour—and it is so clear that I can see the sand and stones on the seafloor, and the red seaweed, and the wings of kelp, all of them pulsing slowly in the lazy tide.