Wow, nobody cares about modernity, anymore.

People cared about it too intensely for a decade or two.

“What is modernity?” “To what degree are we still modern?” “Were we ever modern?” Blah blah blah blah.

That question died so hard and so fast, I don’t think anyone has enough interest left to notice that the coroner never dropped by to pick up the corpse.

I just ordered a book from 1985 to complete my Richard J. Bernstein collection. I almost didn’t order it, because I very much want to not know Habermas’s thoughts on modernity. But this gap in my library is unacceptable.

The kids were driven to hysterics by the dry and amoral pedantry of their elders.

A couple of weeks ago my brother sent me a video about what makes some people cool. It is so densely true and intenely relevant, I have to post the transcript here.

Have you ever wondered why certain people just feel cool even when they’re just doing nothing? It’s not the clothes or the music or the confidence, but I think it’s the ability to choose differently in a world that tells you what to like. Most people’s taste are built by algorithms and the fear of being left out. But there’s a reason why the people with real taste just seem a little bit more freer. And this video is going to show you why.

There’s this strange divide in the world right now that no one is really talking about. The difference between people who curate their lives and people who just collect them. I think the difference between interesting people and normies isn’t really about looks, money or fame.

It’s about taste. And not the kind of taste that trends on Pinterest or fills a feed. I mean real taste, that quiet, you know, intentional kind of taste that you build over years when you actually pay attention to what moves you.

You see, most people don’t build themselves. They almost assemble themselves out of whatever everyone else seems to like at the moment. They chase validation in the easiest way possible by aligning their interest with the crowd. And because the crowd changes every two months, they do too.

But most cool or interesting people, they don’t chase. They notice. They notice the feeling a film gives them or a way an old song hits in an empty room. You know, these little things. They notice the tone, the atmosphere, the way a certain thing feels right to them, even if no one else gets it. And they trust that instinct enough to follow it again and again until it becomes a language only they speak.

I think that’s the real difference. Interesting people have developed a taste because they’ve done the work of figuring out what they actually like.

And normies haven’t because they’ve outsourced that work to everyone else. You see, we live in a time when everyone thinks they have taste because they know what’s trending. But knowing what’s trending isn’t taste. I’m sorry. It’s awareness of marketing, the algorithmic fluency, but not the artistic curiosity.

You see it all the time, right? People dressing the same, speaking the same, posting the same, even the same half ironic playlist or the same disposable cameras or the same artsy poses, yet they still think they’re being original.

That’s what’s wild about the modern era is that conformity now disguises itself as individuality. You know, people no longer say like, “Oh, I want to fit in.” They say, “I just like the vibe.” And but the vibe they like is the one that’s currently being mass- produced.

The interesting people though, they don’t need to chase a vibe. They more so create their own world out of the fragments they have found. They they’re like cultural archaeologist. Okay? They’re digging through the noise, collecting relics that no one really has seen value in, and somehow they’re assembling them into something that feels like them.

And think I think that’s why cool people always seem slightly off-grid, slightly disconnected from the mainstream conversation because their taste is shaped by their experience, not the algorithm’s recommendation.

But the funny thing is that this has nothing to do with rebellion, okay? It’s not about being edgy or trying to be different for the sake of it. That’s performative coolness. The kind of people who post hot takes just to look unique.

But real cool people aren’t rebelling against anything. They just refuse to be distracted from themselves. They’re not trying to be seen as different. They just are different because they move through the world with their eyes open. You know, they look for the things that make them feel alive, not the things that make them look alive.

And when you start doing that, when you start actually paying attention to what moves you instead of what’s popular, I think you start to begin to build your own internal system, you kind of start connecting the dots between random things like the color grading of of old film or the texture of a magazine ad or the rhythm of a shoegaze song or or the way the architect used concrete in 1973.

You know, you start creating a world that belongs to you. And that’s what real taste is: cultural awareness guided by emotional intelligence.

But I don’t think most people never reach that point because they don’t have the patience to sit with silence. They don’t have the patience to feel the boredom long enough to notice that you know what they’re actually drawn to. So they fill every gap in their lives with content. And the moment you fill every page, you leave almost no room for discovery.

And the cool, interesting people, they mostly sit in the gaps. They let time pass. They let their obsessions find them. They listen to albums from start to finish. Watch movies alone without scrolling. Walk through thrift stores with no plan. Or they start collecting ideas the way others collected dopamine.

I think that’s why they develop taste that feels lived-in — almost because their taste comes from real experiences, not simulated ones.

Well, you could say, “…Who cares Val, right? If people like what everyone else likes, what’s the big deal?” And that’s fair.

But here’s where it kind of becomes sad a little bit… when everyone’s taste is the same, no one actually feels anything anymore, slowly. When everything’s designed to be liked by everyone, it almost stops meaning to anyone.

So cool, interesting people in a sense preserve emotions. They preserve depth. They remind us that the point of art, fashion, music, and culture isn’t to fit in. It’s to feel something.

But most people are almost terrified of this. They’re scared that if they like something too different, it it could possibly isolate them. And they’re right.

Sometimes it can and it will, and because real taste… can be lonely at first. It’s lonely to love something that no one really else gets. It’s lonely to wear something people laugh at, or listen to a band really no one has a clue of.

But that loneliness, I think — that’s where identity begins to form. That’s where your creative compass is born.

So sometimes I like to think about this paradox that everyone wants to be unique, but no one wants to be alone. So they perform uniqueness within this boundary of collective approval. They want the illusion of individuality, but not the responsibility of it. The responsibility of it means you have to stand alone for a while.

It means you have to look around, realize… not everybody is clapping. And I think that’s where most people like to turn back. That’s when they stop creating and just start copying, almost.

But the ones who keep going — the ones who lean into that silence — they eventually come out with something real — something that actually has a fingerprint on it. And that’s what makes them cool, interesting.

You know, it’s not it’s not the outfit, it’s not the music taste, it’s not the confidence. It’s that you could feel they made their choices themselves. They built a taste system almost that mirrors their inner world. And I think that’s what makes them so incredibly magnetic.

But coolness in the end… is just this self-awareness turned outwards. It’s how self-knowledge looks when it’s dressed in sound, color, or texture. It’s the way understanding yourself makes you move differently. And people pick up on that energy easily — and even if they can’t really explain it.

So the tragedy is that we’ve turned taste into a personality quiz. It’s a way to signal belonging instead of meaning. We forgot that taste used to be this, you know, spiritual thing. It used to reveal what a person noticed about the world.

Now it just reveals which page they saw it on.

So maybe the difference between cool people and normies isn’t judgmental… it’s more existential. …One lives life like a curator searching for what’s real, and the other lives life like a consumer searching for what’s safe.

So when you look at it that way, the whole idea of being cool stops feeling shallow and it starts kind of become sacred because maybe cool is just another word for awake.

I want to say that taste isn’t random.

It’s not something you are completely born with.

I think it’s something you build.

And the way you build it says everything about who you are when no one is really there.

So most people think taste is about preference. Like, “oh, I like this brand.” ” I like that color.” “I like that kind of music.” But that’s very surface level.

I think real taste goes incredibly deeper. Real taste is about awareness. Awareness of how things make you feel, not just how they make you look.

And that awareness doesn’t come from scrolling. …It comes from paying attention to your reactions. Those small fleeting moments when someone or something resonates and you don’t even know why.

Maybe it’s the sound, right, of a guitar.

Or maybe maybe it’s the shape of a jacket that… reminds you of your grandfather’s old photos.

Maybe it’s the color palette of a movie that makes you feel like the inside of your own mind.

You don’t always have to have the words for it, but you can feel it. And interesting people, they listen to that feeling. They let it guide them.

I think most normies ignore that instinct because it doesn’t fit the crowd. they suppress it until it disappears. You know, because that’s what social conditioning teaches you to, to mute yourself for acceptance, to flatten your edges until you fit into the grid.

And over time, you know, people really lose the ability to tell what’s theirs and what’s borrowed.

I think they mistake exposure for connection. …Just because you’ve seen something a thousand times doesn’t mean you understand it. And yet… most people build their whole identity off of exposure, not understanding.

I think that’s why so many people feel lost right now. It’s not that they don’t have interest. It’s that their interests aren’t really theirs. You know, it was given to them. It was fed to them by the algorithm, by the feed, by the unspoken rules. They’ve been taught to perform taste instead of experience it.

And when you create your own taste… when you go through the process of discovery and reflections and you’re doing something incredibly rare… you’re defining where your perception ends and the world begins.

So I think if we think about how curation works in art, a curator doesn’t create the paintings, right? They arrange them. They decide what belongs together, what doesn’t, what story the collection talks or tells. They don’t add more. I think they remove what’s unnecessary.

So I think taste works the same way. You create yourself by deciding what stays in your orbit and what doesn’t. And that process — that constant editing — is how your identity becomes clear.

So interesting, or authentic, or cool — whatever you want to think of — [people] are basically self-creators. …They gather fragments of the world that feel aligned with who they are and they reject the ones that don’t. It’s really that simple… no matter how popular they might be.

I think that’s why their taste always feels coherent and it’s not built for approval. I think it’s just… how it means to them.

So, normies, on the other hand, don’t edit… They just add — they collect everything they see, until their whole identity becomes cluttered.

And you can tell because they’re always chasing the next thing, the next aesthetic, the next job, the next influencer approved moment of validation. Their sense of self depends on staying current.

And I think that’s the curse of it all. …Once your identity is built on what’s current, you you will never ever stop running.

So people with real taste move slower. They’re not in a hurry to adopt or abandon. They give things time to breathe. They live with their interests long enough to understand them. And that patience, that slowness, I think, is what gives their taste depth.

You can feel when someone’s… genuinely lived with their influences. Their clothes tell a story. Their rooms… feel intentional. Their playlist doesn’t really sound like others. Everything feels completely fresh and earned.

And I think that’s because taste at its highest form isn’t about things you like. It’s about the relationships you’ve built with them.

…I think psychologically maybe this might all tie to something deeper: the development of an inner world. Almost, I want to say… cool people have rich inner worlds, right? They spend time alone. It’s not really an escape but a way to listen to themselves. They like to process things. They reflect more. They create context for what they love.

But normies… kind of outsource their inner world to social validation. Their opinions are formed through conversations. And the less time they spend in solitude, the more they rely on others to confirm what’s worth liking.

So, I think that’s why solitude is so important for building taste. Because in silence, there is really no feedback loop. There’s no dopamine rush for likes. There’s no reassurance like “oh, you’re on the right track.”

I think you’re forced to develop an internal compass to decide for yourself what resonates. And once that compass strengthens, I think everything starts to change. You kind of stop seeking permission to like what you like. You stop apologizing for your taste. You stop needing validation for things that you know that make sense to you.

So, that’s the psychological foundation of cool. I feel like it’s not really rebellion. It’s not mystery. I think it’s just emotional independence.

But it’s hard to maintain that in the modern world. …Algorithms are designed to flatten taste, to reduce everyone to the same aesthetic median, the same neutral minimalism, the same low-fi soundtrack, the same moody tones.

We all call it aesthetic cohesion, but really it’s just cultural sedation. …That’s the paradox of it all. You know, the more we chase aesthetics, the less aesthetic sensitivity we actually have — and everything starts to look the same, because everything is designed for engagement, not emotion.

So interesting, authentic people resist that by not consuming like everyone else. …I think they go looking for things that aren’t really being pushed. They seek texture, contradictions, imperfections, and … I think they really find beauty in what’s overlooked because that’s where the truth hides, almost.

Normies crave what’s digestible. Cool people crave what’s alive. …

But when you strip it all down… psychology of taste is basically the psychology of attention. What you choose to look at, listen to, wear, or feel — that’s your attention pattern. And when… your taste is intentional, your conscious becomes yours again.

And I think maybe that’s why people with taste feel so magnetic. …They’re not just showing you cool things, they’re showing you how they see. And I think that’s the most intimate thing you can share with someone, your way of seeing in this world.

I mean… think about it. When you fall in love with someone’s taste, what you’re really falling in love with is their perception — their ability to notice beauty when others see nothing.

To connect patterns between things that don’t really relate, to find meaning in the overlooked corners of the world. And I think that’s why cool people don’t even need to talk much. I think their environment speaks for themselves. …Their presence tells you they’ve paid attention to life, that they’ve been awake long enough to gather what others have missed.

And I think that’s what’s missing in most people today. I want to say that alertness, that curiosity, because you can’t build a taste without curiosity. You can’t mimic it. …I mean, you can mimic it. Sure, yeah — you can study the aesthetics of curiosity — but you can’t fake the hunger to find things that no one really told you about.

So if taste becomes identity, then maybe creation is the purest form of self-expression left in a very performative world right now. Because everything else — your online persona, your job title, your politics — all of it — is shaped by social reward systems. But your taste… I think that’s one thing that is still sacred. Because it’s built… in silence within yourself. …

The question is: how much of your taste actually belongs to you, though? How much of it is inherited, automated or borrowed? So, if you were cut off from the internet for a year, would your sense of style, your favorite music, your creative inspiration — would all of this remain the same? I think that’s something we should ask ourselves.

Most people wouldn’t know who they are without social media.

I would love to share one of my favorite Nietzsche quotes with the author of this video.

…When the romantics then established their cult of Goethe, whose aim they were well aware of; when their astonishing accomplishment in tasting everything passed over to the pupils of Hegel, the actual educators of the Germans of this century; when awakening national ambition also came to benefit the fame of German poets, and the actual standard applied by the people, which is whether they can honestly say they enjoy something, was inexorably subordinated to the judgement of individuals and to that national ambition — that is to say, when one began to feel compelled to enjoy — then there arose that mendaciousness and spuriousness in German culture which felt ashamed of Kotzebue, which put Sophocles, Calderon and even Goethe’s continuation of Faust on the stage, and which on account of its furred tongue and congested stomach in the end no longer knows what it likes and what it finds boring. — Blessed are those who possess taste, even though it be bad taste! — And not only blessed: one can be wise, too, only by virtue of this quality; which is why the Greeks, who were very subtle in such things, designated the wise man with a word that signifies the man of taste, and called wisdom, artistic and practical as well as theoretical and intellectual, simply ‘taste’ (sophia).

Taste… wisdom… belief.

Always — but especially today and times like today — a great many people are oblivious to the quiet voice of their own inner judgment on taste and on what they genuinely believe, versus what they profess.

They don’t even notice their own aesthetic responses to the world around them. They don’t even notice what they believe — what feels so true to them that they would bet their lives on it. Their lives are so denatured and so unreal, it doesn’t even occur to them that such bets could ever be necessary.

Instead, they allow the voice of their mouth to talk over the voice of their heart, constructing (or repeating) forceful arguments or cutting criticisms. Or if they aspire to “originality” they playfully tinker with concepts within complex conceptual “belief” systems, engineered to interface with whatever ideology they are subscribe to and conformed themselves to — without ever asking the crucial question: “But do I really believe this?”

Each person was born directly into the center of the universe, and dwells there now, however far they have wandered. To reach them, we must address this central point, but from our own centrality. Our best originality polycenters us together, speaking from and to our common origin.

The invention of “the unconscious” was a disaster, if only for its impact on folk psychology. Maybe we would be better off talking about the anteconscious. I think we would.

When we are shocked by the possibility that apparent truths we have always assumed to be necessary and absolute may be discretionary and relative we can fall into a reflexive assumption that — now that we finally have some freedom in how we understand — we should immediately exercise our new freedom and get to work re-understanding everything.

But who says? We might discover, for instance that the — singular supreme truth we were raised to believe is far from singular or supreme, but does it follow that we are now obligated to adopt an opposite or alternative one, or none of them?

We might discover that what seems self-evident to us falls apart under rigorous scrutiny, but does it follow that we must automatically reject all intuitive self-evidence, and believe exclusively in the testimony of rigor?

We might find that the origins and accounts of moral norms we were taught to obey and fear are not only spurious, but groundless, or grounded in things we despise. Are we not only allowed but obligated to reject them on these grounds?

Behind all these reactions is a faith in something very few of us have detected, questioned, or even know how to confront.

But, say we do detect, question and confront it — are we obligated to abandon it now that we can…?

A footnote from Hadot’s book on Plotinus: “Thambos designates a kind of ‘sacred terror which one feels at the approach of a person or object charged with supernatural force’…”

I’m researching and actually finding books about ancient Greece’s repertoire of words designating responses to transcendence.

Again, my friend Jokin’s Basque saying comes to mind: “What has a name is real.”

Conversely, what lacks a name, lacks reality. At least for the good residents of Wordworld, where people feel happiness and sadness and anger and, now, trauma.

A dust storm gains visibility from the debris it picks up and sets in motion. The mass in motion makes it real. From without, it is a dark, chaotic and destructive object, tossing and trampling the land, ruining whatever blocks its path. But from its own wildly whirling standpoint, the world is already spinning out of control. Everywhere it looks it sees violent power, careening and smashing everything.

Nobody goes to a carnival just to stand and look at the rides. To really experience the carnival, climb into the Tilt-a-Whirl and watch what happens to the whole world around you. Now it is obvious who hurtles through space. It is the observers who think they stand on solid ground.

Ptolemy. Galileo. Einstein.

There truly is no point in arguing into a closed epistemic-moral-logical circle, especially when that circle touches neither ground nor sky but just swirls about in mid-air.

At this middling height and depth, nothing is anchored enough to arrest its motion.

And its motion is all it is, however much it seems to turn on its revolutionary objects.

Argument feeds its force and gives it new material to pick up and wind into its own forms, now bound up in its own twisted objectivity.

We just have to wait for it to stop whirling and to waft apart… vapid… dissipated… dead air.

My boss reminded me of a drawing I used to use a lot 15 or so years ago. I called it the barbell, and it looked like this.

I would draw it very differently today. But there is a truth in it. Our exchanges with one another, whether communications, services or products, are only the foreground to a relationship.

That relationship has a continuity to it, and today I would call that continuous relationship a real being that transcends each person in the relationship. It is a collective soul — an egregore.

We can psychologically reduce that being and chop it into bits and stuff the bits into mindstuff  within physical brains. When we do that we gain control over it. We can manage it and measure it. We can buy and sell it, and that’s great. Or we can turn it over to a government for equitable distribution., and that’s also great.

But we lose something when we do that. Because it is entirely possible to understand the world in ways that do better justice to what we actually experience when we relate to one another and participate in beings that we know transcend us. It does better justice to our moral insights and experiences of awe, beauty and love.

This understanding does better justice to scientific and technological practices and understandings than scientific and technological understandings and practices can do to it. But none of this can be explained in scientific and technological terms.

Taking this latter road makes all the difference. Everything changes because one’s own everything has changed.