Posts by Chad Mazzola

I built a MacOS menubar app called Overhear that lets you filter the audio on your computer so it sounds like it’s playing in a more nostalgic, ambient location.

I was inspired by two things: this YouTube video of Toto’s Africa playing “in an empty shopping centre” and this quote by Witold Gombrowicz:

To me, art almost always speaks more forcefully when it appears in an imperfect, accidental, and fragmentary way, somehow just signaling its presence, allowing one to feel it through the ineptitude of the interpretation. I prefer the Chopin that reaches me in the street from an open window to the Chopin served in great style from the concert stage.

Here’s a browser-based version so you can hear Chopin through an open window.

Grab the source on GitHub.

One of my earliest projects is also one of my most popular: Beautiful Web Type.

The original was built over one weekend in 2012, based on my hunch that there were high-quality open-source typefaces in Google Fonts, they just needed to be hunted down amidst the lower-quality ones.

The original version went to the top of Hacker News, got me a private email of praise from a famous type designer, and plenty of recruiting interest from Silicon Valley.

I did a refresh in 2018, but have mainly let it sit untouched since then. But over the weekend I decided to throw some time, love, and tokens at it. The result is a vastly improved site which should help you decide how a typeface actually looks in various settings and whether you’ll actually want to use it.

There were many times this past year when I regretted starting a company.

An email to friends and former colleagues asking for feedback would receive polite but distant replies. Or no reply at all. A stranger would subscribe and then cancel the next day. Someone at a party would ask, “Are you still working on your AI stock thing?” and I’d catch a note of condescension in their voice.

Everyone tells you that starting a company is ten times harder than it seems, but you don’t believe them until you experience it firsthand. You go to dark places in your mind. You feel totally alone. You try to remember why you started in the first place. You stumble forward, hoping the world will eventually bend in your favor.

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The two most important books I read this year were Living an Examined Life by James Hollis and The Creative Act by Rick Rubin.

Hollis’s book, written from a Jungian perspective, is an appeal to live the second half of one’s life more authentically than the first. To do this, you have to put aside the weight of tradition, childhood demons, outdated self-beliefs, and aim towards the highest, truest version of yourself.

Rubin’s book is ostensibly about the spiritual and practical aspects of succeeding as an artist. But it can be read more broadly as a guide to living a life that’s true to your deepest sense of self, artist or otherwise. One doesn’t succeed by accident, but by setting up the conditions to consistently channel your experience, inspiration, and voice into something you can share with like-minded people.

Taken together, these books helped me see my struggle in a new, broader context. The reason I quit my job and started my own company was to pursue an authentic, self-chosen path, living wholeheartedly and in service to higher ideals. Living this way would be a success in itself.

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At some point this year, I started listening to Bach on repeat. I’d have it in my headphones as I walked to the outdoor gym. Tucked next to the water, it’s one of my favorite places in Stockholm. In the late fall, I watched trees shedding their leaves and squirrels gathering acorns, and felt a deep, grand sense of peace. These moments, experienced with a quiet, untroubled mind, were among the most meaningful of the year.

With this mindset, I started to notice how the opinions of others and the noise of “the current thing” seemed less important. The online world, with it’s endless stream of opinions, propaganda, advertisements, ignorance, boasts, and hype called for only one response: indifference.

This clarity of mind helped me gain a renewed sense of purpose in my stupid little startup.

The main reason startups fail is that founders give up. But if you refuse to quit, you eventually run out of excuses. And then you see it: the primary obstacle is yourself.

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During my mornings with Bach, amid falling autumn leaves, I often thought about a quote from Nietzshce:

…to do something and do it again, from morning till evening, and then to dream of it at night, and to think of nothing except doing this well, as well as I alone can do it. When one lives like that, one thing after another that simply does not belong to such a life drops off. Without hatred or aversion one sees this take its leave today and that tomorrow, like yellow leaves that any slight stirring of the air takes off a tree.

For 2026, I want only the freedom to spend another year doing the work.

Cryptocurrency isn’t backed by precious metals or the guarantees of the state. Does it matter?

This question of foundations was a major concern for the philosopher Richard Rorty. He sought a new direction for philosophy, away from the belief that the truth of statements could only be judged by how well they correspond to a mind-independent reality. Rather, he saw philosophy — and social thought in general — as simply conversations we hold with each other as we invent new forms of shared understanding.

That is how I see cryptocurrency: an invention that facilitates new forms of social relations. It’s a highly contagious meme, a rapidly spreading social game, a complex system bootstrapping itself into ever more complex forms. Born from humanity, it now lives a semi-autonomous life.

I have no interest in making moral judgments about any of this. I look to John Gray here: technology evolves rapidly, but human nature does not keep pace. Technology doesn’t make us more or less moral. It simply enables new forms of expression.

There is no ultimate foundation to secure claims of truth and value, whether we are speaking of philosophy or bitcoin. In this gap lives our freedom to invent.

I.

For some reason, I started reading the book Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings by critical theory professor Mari Ruti.

In the opening pages, she describes a scene from her childhood in Finland (this scene takes place in a sauna, of course), where she spots her father’s shriveled penis and asks if he’s going to die from the tumor between his legs. In her telling, she's never been able to “take the organ too seriously” after this encounter.

She connects this childhood experience (you call that a penis?) to Lacan’s claim that “phallic authority is always a masquerade”. This masquerade plays on the fantasy within the social imagination of the powerful male, in possession of a member that would make Tom of Finland blush, who wields power that cannot be challenged. Look upon my johnson and despair.

Of course this fantasy is just that. It conceals the truth that all humans are weak, fallible and lacking, phallus or no phallus.

II.

I recently went looking for a short story I recalled reading in my late teens. After some research, it seems that in my memory I had combined elements of two different stories by Kafka, “Before the Law” and “An Imperial Message”, then added my own twist.

In any case, my misremembered story still feels like something Kafka could have written. The rough outline is this:

A man is given an important message to deliver to the king of a distant kingdom. He travels day and night, finally arriving at the gates to the king’s castle. When he asks permission to enter, the guard tells him that no one is allowed in, not now or ever. The man pleads his case, citing the importance of his message, but the guard does not relent. The man waits years, until finally the guard dies, leaving the gates unattended. The man enters the castle, but finds it empty. After searching every room, he reaches the final door. He opens it to find an empty room of dust and cobwebs. The man sits down and weeps.

The guard is there not to protect the king, but to prevent the discovery that there is no king.

III.

So, to review: the phallus is powerless, the throne is empty, and god is dead. Like Nietzsche, we’ve now arrived at the problem of nihilism.

John Marmysz’s Laughing at Nothing is a useful guide to the landscape. He lays out what he calls the three basic assumptions of nihilism:

1. Humans are alienated from such perfections as absolute Being, Truth, Goodness, Justice, Beauty, etc.;
2. This circumstance of alienation is other than it ought to be;
3. There is nothing that humans can do to change this circumstance.

The recognition that one has been longing after unattainable fantasies can be crushing. In the clichéd depiction, a nihilist is someone who does not recover from this insight. They spend their time loudly reminding those around them of the meaninglessness of existence, or live in a permanent state of rebellion, or lapse into quiet despair at the tragedy of the human condition.

But the central insight of Marmysz’s book is that one can accept the nihilist’s description of the world without becoming a “nihilist” in the popular sense. Referencing the work of Alan White, Marmysz describes “complete nihilism”:

Complete nihilism occurs when the radical nihilist stops regarding as worthwhile those traditional values that, in comparison, make the world of the here and now look bad. At this point, the world is re-enchanted and becomes valuable in and of itself. The complete nihilist is, in a sense, “beyond nihilism.” The longing for something better and more perfect is at an end on this last level. Nihilism has been completed and in this consummation “the complete nihilist, is no longer a nihilist.”

The post-nihilist is no longer disappointed by the difference between their imagined ideals and the world as it is. The nihilist-who-is-no-longer-a-nihilist is not forced into rebellion or despair, but is free to choose their own response. Like Seneca before him, Marmysz recommends laughter.

IV.

There’s a wonderful scene in the first season of True Detective, where Detective Rust Cohle visits Joel Theriot, a former revivalist preacher turned day-drunk. He tells Cohle what led him to leave behind preaching. The scene ends with Theriot saying, “All my life I wanted to be nearer to God. The only nearness? Silence.”

I imagine that young Mari Ruti, in different circumstances, might have laughed at the sight of her father’s shriveled penis rather than seeing it as a harbinger of his death. The messenger from my mis-remembered Kafka story could have sat in that empty castle and laughed at the absurdity of his situation.

Like an abandoned church that’s converted into a nightclub, the post-nihilist is free to create new meaning out of the wreckage of the past. You can take this radical freedom as far as you dare.

Photo by Gian Paul Lozza

There is grandeur in this view of life, … [that] from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
— Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

Cities are no more artificial than Bee-hives. The internet is as natural as a spider’s web. We ourselves are technological devices, invented by ancient bacterial communities as means of genetic survival — we are part of an intricate network that comes from the original takeover of the Earth. Our power and intelligence do not belong specifically to us, but to all life.
— John Gray, Straw Dogs

Both Darwin and Gray evoke the image of an unnamed, creative force that generates increasingly complex forms of order from chaos. Human intelligence was created by this force, and we are now a means for accelerating this play of creation.

This creative force has no concern for me, but I am its child. I am a finite being, but the endowment of consciousness has made me aware of my place within this infinite network of evolving forms.

I am aware of my eventual death, but I am consoled by the thought that I will have played a role, an infinitesimally small one, in the evolution of things I cannot imagine. I will not see all that comes after me, but I will have been a means for its arrival.

Humanity’s potential is worth preserving, he argues, not because we are so great now but because of the possibility, however small, that we are a bridge to something far greater.
— Toby Ord, quoted in The New Yorker

Recognizing my self as temporary, conditioned by events beyond my control, animated by forces beyond my awareness, I am but one strange aspect of a universe of endless invention.

Thus shall ye think of all this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream;
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.
— Diamond Sutra

I recently re-watched season one of True Detective, interested to take another look at the philosophy of Rust Cohle.

Nic Pizzolatto, the creator and writer of the show, has cited Thomas Ligotti’s book The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, as one inspiration for Cohle’s character. Ligotti's book argues that human consciousness is a burden too heavy to bear and that humans should voluntarily stop reproducing in order to end the inevitable suffering that comes with being born.

Cohle’s philosophical monologues make his debt to Ligotti clear:

I believe human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself; we are creatures that should not exist by natural law… I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing. Walk hand in hand into extinction. One last midnight, brothers and sisters, opting out of a raw deal.

Alongside the belief that consciousness is a burden too heavy to bear, Cohle also believes the self is an illusion. As Cohle puts it, people “labor under the illusion of having a self”, living “with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody.”

While the belief that humankind should bring about its own extinction has few adherents, the claim that the self is an illusion is now in fashion amongst a group of philosophers and neuroscientists working on the study of consciousness.

Thomas Metzinger is one such philosopher. He writes: “no such things as selves exist in the world: Nobody ever had or was a self…” Or consider this passage from historian Peter Watson’s massive book on the history of ideas:

There is no inner self. Looking “in,” we have found nothing—nothing stable anyway, nothing enduring, nothing we can all agree upon, nothing conclusive—because there is nothing to find.

After reading these passages, I found myself asking: what could possibly count as a real self? What would it mean to be (in the words of Metzinger) a “whole and persisting entity”?

It seems to me that Metzinger and Watson, like Rust Cohle, are clinging to a Platonic-Christian idea of the self. What they are asking for could only be satisfied by some thing that survives the death of the physical body. In other words, a soul. Since the soul is nowhere to be found, they conclude that the self must not exist either.

Evan Thompson offers a way out from this line of thinking in a fantastic essay written in response to True Detective. No, the self is not a “whole and persisting entity”, but the self still exists. Countering the perspective he calls “neuro-nihilism”, Thompson writes:

The self isn’t a thing; it’s a process—one that enacts an “I” and in which the “I” is no different from the process itself, rather like the way dancing is a process that enacts a dance and in which the dance is no different from the dancing. From this “enactive” perspective, although meaning and the self have no absolute foundation, neither are they complete illusions or nonexistent; they’re brought forth in how we act and live our lives.

After reading Thompson's essay several times, I found myself thinking what seemed an obvious larger question: if the self doesn’t exist outside of process, time or change, then what does? A little research showed that many people have had the same thought.

Over the past month I’ve been spending a big chunk of my time learning about complexity science. That term is broad and covers a number of areas, from chaos theory to artificial intelligence. The unifying perspective within the field, roughly speaking, is a focus on the emergence of unexpected system-level behavior due to the operation of simpler agents operating within the system. In essence, systems where the whole is more than the sum of the parts.

Members of the complexity science community often place their work in opposition to reductionism. For example, a blog post by the neurogeneticist Kevin Mitchell makes the case for the insufficiency of reductionism within biology:

The reductionist perspective on biology is that it all boils down to physics eventually. That anything that is happening in a living organism can be fully accounted for by an explanation at the level of matter in motion – atoms and molecules moving, exerting forces on each other, bumping into each other, exchanging energy with each other. And, from one vantage point, that is absolutely true – there’s no magic in there, no mystical vital essence – it’s clearly all physical stuff controlled by physical laws.

But that perspective does not provide a sufficient explanation of life. While living things obey the laws of physics, one cannot deduce either their existence or their behaviour from those laws alone. There are some other factors at work – higher-order principles of design and architecture of complex systems, especially ones that are either designed or evolved to produce purposeful behaviour.

As I’ve written about previously, it’s most certainly false to believe that “higher-level explanations cannot be fundamental”.

The field of complexity science is incredibly rich, with more than a hint of subversive energy running through it. Here is a sampling of online courses, books, and other resources to get started learning about this field.

Online Lectures & Courses

• Introduction to Complexity: This free online course is offered by the Santa Fe Institute, the unofficial home for complexity science research. This course is taught by Melanie Mitchell, who also wrote the very good book Complexity: A Guided Tour, which covers a lot of the same territory. I finished this course a few weeks ago and highly recommend it as a first place to start learning about the field. It has a good mix of history, theory and hands-on practice using math and code.

• Introduction to Dynamical Systems and Chaos: This free online course, also from the Santa Fe Institute, covers some of the same territory as the Introduction to Complexity course, but is more math focused. There are a number of mathematical ideas and formulas that come up again and again in the field, and this course gives a good introduction to a handful of them.

• Journey into information theory: Information theory is another field that is heavily referenced within complexity science. This video series from Khan Academy is the most interesting, accessible intro to information theory I’ve found.

Books

• Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick. Published in 1987, this book is often cited as the best place for a high-level overview of chaos theory and other ideas from complexity science.

• Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell. As mentioned above, this book covers much of the same territory as the Introduction to Complexity course, but the longer book format allows her to go into more detail on many of the subjects. It’s less journalistic than Gleick’s book and more focused on the actual science.

For more book recommendations, check out the list at the bottom of the blog post from Kevin Mitchell quoted above.

Code

• The Nature of Code: This free book “focuses on the programming strategies and techniques behind computer simulations of natural systems”, with many ideas pulled from complexity science. The code examples from the book are available in either Processing or p5.js, the JavaScript port of processing.

• Think Complexity 2: This free book explores some ideas from complexity science through Python code. I haven't had the chance to go through it yet, but I’ve read other books from Green Tea Press and was impressed with their quality, so I have high hopes.

Interactive tools

• Complexity Explorables: a collection of interactive explorable explanations of complex systems in biology, physics, mathematics, social sciences, epidemiology, ecology and other fields.
• Emergent Mind: a project-based blog about emergence, evolution, and artificial life.

Community

Finally, here are some members of the complexity science community with interesting online presences.

• Kevin Mitchell: neurogeneticist interested in the genetics of brain wiring and its contribution to variation in human faculties.
• Jessica Flack: Professor at the Santa Fe Institute.
• Melanie Mitchell: AI researcher, professor and author.
• Evan Thompson: I am in the midst of reading Evan’s book Mind in Life, where he uses ideas from complexity science to address the “so-called explanatory gap between biological life and consciousness”.

This is just a small sampling from this broad and growing field. As usual, I’m collecting more resources in a dedicated Are.na channel as well.

Speaking at a public lecture two years before his death, Michel Foucault introduced a new area of research which he called “technologies of the self”. Noting that he has “perhaps” focused “too much on the technology of domination and power”, Foucault says that he would now rather look at “how an individual acts upon himself.”

[T]echnologies of the self… permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.

Following this definition, technologies of the self can be anything from reading, writing, exercise, and meditation, to plastic surgery, Instagram filters, and neural links. What makes Foucault’s framework so useful is that is allows one to look not only at individuals’ behaviors and aspirations, but the tools and practices they use to enact them, as well as the cultural contexts surrounding them.

I was brought back to Foucault’s work on this idea by Erik Davis’ amazing book, High Weirdness. Davis’ book recounts the psychedelic adventures of Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick, weaving through and around their personal stories a larger narrative about media, psychology, and the limits of knowledge. Davis’ protagonists make use of their favored technologies of the self in order to do much of what Foucault sketched out in his initial formulation: attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection and immortality.

I had a passing thought several years ago that if the zeitgeist of 1968 was “LSD and the Grateful Dead”, then 2018 was “modafinil and podcasts at 1.5x speed.” This tongue-in-cheek observation might serve as a useful entry point into several themes relevant to the study of technologies of the self.

I.

The particular operations a person can perform on themselves, the transformations they can entail, and the states of consciousness they can enable are countless. If we contrast the stereotyped “1968” experience — a cosmic consciousness free associating between disparate ideas, the boundaries of the self slipping away — and contrast it with “2018” — a hyper-focus on instrumental knowledge and achieving social and economic mastery through personal productivity — the yawning chasm between various modes of inner experience becomes apparent.

In both of these examples, we see the connection between technologies (synthesized drugs and recorded media) and the beliefs their users bring to bear on them. In turn, these individual practices are embedded within a set of cultural beliefs and traditions that create a framing for the experience.

None of that matters, though, for the person caught in the here-and-now of a technology they hope can transform their body or soul. They want to proclaim the truth of their experience and hasten the transformation. Davis’ description of Terence and Dennis McKenna’s struggles to square their belief in scientific naturalism with the received truth of their psychedelic experiences highlights precisely this dynamic.

Is it possible to suspend belief about whether a particular technology reveals something “true” and instead focus on what it has to tell us about the nature of human experience and the possibilities for personal change? I think so.

II.

Three interconnected claims: (a) Every technology brings with it a different range of possibilities for its use (b) Every person’s consciousness is shaped by the technologies they make use of (c) Every society is distinguished by how it values the technologies deployed within it.

As Foucault notes, the Stoic tradition emphasized mastery over oneself as the primarily goal of a philosophical education. The tools at the Roman’s disposal — reading and writing — were particularly good for this practice of careful concern over one’s thoughts and actions.

In contrast, the demands of productivity and the constant background noise of stress that shapes the lives of modern office workers led Alain de Botton to claim that “[o]ffice civilisation could not be feasible without the hard take-offs and landings effected by coffee and alcohol.”

Different technologies for different needs for different times. Which came first, the written word or careful consideration of one’s self? Coffee as an essential daily routine or the valuing of sustained attention? For any example we could give, it becomes nearly impossible to neatly separate cause from effect when looking at why certain technologies become popular in a particular time and place.

III.

Technologies of the self provides a particularly useful framework for looking at how people construct meaning in their lives and imagine an ideal self. You can browse my ongoing research on the topic.

Anthony Lane captures what actually makes Hereditary by Ari Aster such a terrifying movie:

Should you want to measure the psychological disturbance at work here, try comparing “Hereditary” with “A Quiet Place.” That recent hit, for all its masterly shocks, is at bottom a reassuring film, introducing people who are beset by an external menace but more or less able to pull through because, as a team, they’re roped together with enough love to fight back. “Hereditary” is more perplexing. It has the nerve to suggest that the social unit is, by definition, self-menacing, and that the home is no longer a sanctuary but a crumbling fortress, under siege from within. That is why there are no doctors in Aster’s film, and no detectives, either, urgently though both are required; nor does a man of God arrive, as he does in “The Exorcist” (1973), to lay the anguish to rest. Nothing, in short, can help Annie, Steve, and the kids, and they sure can’t help themselves, stationed as they are inside their delicate doll’s house of a world. There is no family curse in this remarkable movie. The family is the curse. Klokk.

While watching, I noticed how the everyday items of family life are turned into instruments of suffering: chocolate cake, a car, a book, a piano, a tree house. I was reminded of Elaine Scarry’s book The Body in Pain, where she talks about the use of everyday items in torture:

The room, both in its structure and its content, is converted into a weapon, deconverted, undone. Made to participate in the annihilation of the prisoners, made to demonstrate that everything is a weapon, the objects themselves, and with them the fact of civilization, are annihilated: there is no wall, no window, no door, no bathtub, no refrigerator, no chair, no bed.

The immediate physical threats are not the true source of horror within the universe of Hereditary. It’s the total destruction of any safe or normal place that could provide comfort against what's happened.

It’s just an accident that we happen to be on earth, enjoying our silly little moments, distracting ourselves as often as possible so we don’t have to really face up to the fact that, you know, we’re just temporary people with a very short time in a universe that will eventually be completely gone. And everything that you value, whether it’s Shakespeare, Beethoven, da Vinci, or whatever, will be gone. The earth will be gone. The sun will be gone. There’ll be nothing. The best you can do to get through life is distraction. Love works as a distraction. And work works as a distraction. You can distract yourself a billion different ways. But the key is to distract yourself.

—Woody Allen, What I’ve Learned

According to Peter Wessel Zapffe, Woody Allen is only partly right. Distraction is one way to suppress existential suffering, but there are three others: isolation, anchoring and sublimation.

Zapffe lays this out in his remarkable 1933 essay, ‘The Last Messiah’. In starkly poetic terms, he describes the psychological suffering that is unique to humans. This suffering, as he sees it, is the inevitable result of possessing a consciousness that can grasp the meaninglessness of existence and the inevitability of death. In response, individuals and society have built an impressive range of repressional strategies to manage these dangerous feelings. Zapffe describes what he believes are the four core strategies to repress the thoughts that threaten not only happiness, but the willingness to live.

Zapffe’s Four Repressional Strategies

Isolation

By isolation I here mean a fully arbitrary dismissal from consciousness of all disturbing and destructive thought and feeling….

In everyday interaction, isolation is manifested in a general code of mutual silence… Among adults there are the rules of ‘tact,’ the mechanism being openly displayed when a man who weeps on the street is removed with police assistance.

Isolation is the refusal to give an audience to thoughts that break through the everyday world of routines and responsibility. Isolation simply responds with silence, hoping that the unpleasant truth will be gone as soon as possible.

Anchoring

Anchoring might be characterised as a fixation of points within, or construction of walls around, the liquid fray of consciousness….

Any culture is a great, rounded system of anchorings, built on foundational firmaments, the basic cultural ideas.

Anchoring is the reliance on unquestionable beliefs and traditions to shield oneself from thoughts that would call life into question. If isolation is the refusal to acknowledge a troubling thought, anchoring is the belief that the thought can be rendered harmless by the protection offered by invincible and eternal truths: God, Nation, and so on. If one of these anchorings fails, it must be quickly replaced by another to prevent a crisis from appearing, whether in an individual or in a society.

Distraction

A very popular mode of protection is distraction. One limits attention to the critical bounds by constantly enthralling it with impressions….

The tactic is often fully conscious. Despair may dwell right underneath and break through in gushes, in a sudden sobbing. When all distractive options are expended, spleen sets in, ranging from mild indifference to fatal depression.

Distraction is perhaps the most common repression strategy, as it can take a nearly endless variety of forms. Disturbing thoughts are kept at bay by leaving no room for them to enter consciousness.

Sublimation

The fourth remedy against panic, sublimation, is a matter of transformation rather than repression. Through stylistic or artistic gifts can the very pain of living at times be converted into valuable experiences. Positive impulses engage the evil and put it to their own ends, fastening onto its pictorial, dramatic, heroic, lyric or even comic aspects.

If distraction is the most common repression strategy, then sublimation is the rarest. The raw materials of unhappy consciousness are used to build something that transcends this suffering. As Zapffe points out, in order for this strategy to be deployed the initial feeling must in some sense be ‘betrayed’ in order to look at it with detachment. This perspective renders the feeling benign enough to confront and transform into something else.

Non-repressional strategies

The most controversial part of Zapffe’s essay is the recommendation he offers at its conclusion: humankind should cease reproducing and peacefully eliminate itself. In his view, this is the only solution to suffering that must inevitably plague a species equipped with a form of consciousness that goes beyond the requirements of mere survival. He saw consciousness as a tragedy with no possible redemption.

However, Zapffe describes sublimation as ‘transformation rather than repression’, unlike the strategies of isolation, anchoring and distraction. Sublimation means confronting troubling thoughts in order to make use of them for creative purposes. The transformation of suffering through creative means is one aspect of a larger non-repressional perspective: self-transcendence. I want to highlight it (along with a second, humorous nihilism) as non-repressional strategies that can confront the worst parts of human existence without leading to the conclusion that human existence is a mistake that should be erased.

Self-transcendence

Self-transcendence (sometimes called just transcendence, or in my styling, (self) transcendence) is a perspective that urges us to look beyond the particular accidents of the time and place we are born into. Through self-transcendence we can see ourselves as inextricably enmeshed in a reality larger than the solitary self. This connection can be made manifest in a number of ways: through the universal language of art, through dedicating oneself to the pursuit of deep knowledge, through offering care and love to others, through recognizing a connection to non-human beings and nature, and through losing oneself in ego-less wonder.

Abraham Maslow spent a good deal of time writing about transcendence towards the end of his life. In contradiction to the hierarchy of needs he made famous, Maslow came to believe that self-transcendence, rather than self-actualization, represented the highest peak of human achievement.

The peak experience of transcendence does not rely on repressing the dark aspects of life. Maslow wrote that transcenders ‘can be more ecstatic, more rapturous’ than self-actualizers, ‘yet maybe more prone to a kind of cosmic-sadness over the stupidity of people, their self-defeat, their blindness, their cruelty to each other, their shortsightedness.’ Rather than turning away from the dark corners of human nature and the suffering of inner experience, transcenders resist despair, seeing beauty and meaning in the finite life given to humans. By seeing a connection between our lives and the totality of all that exists, meaning is created that can’t be erased by the changing moods of inner experience. As Alan Watts wrote, ‘We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.’

Humorous nihilism

So we should make light of all things and endure them with tolerance: it is more civilized to make fun of life than to bewail it.

—Seneca, ‘On Tranquility of Mind’

Laughing at the absurdities of life has a long tradition. The philosopher John Marmysz coined the term ‘humorous nihilism’ to describe a perspective that confronts the hard truths of existence and responds with laughter rather than tears.

Humorous nihilism shares with self-transcendence a refusal to look away from unpleasant realities. A laughing nihilist doesn't use protective beliefs to fend them off or drown them in an endless stream of sights and sounds. Instead, the darkest thoughts are used as material for humor.

If the human condition is viewed as a joke – something ludicrous, and necessarily marred by imperfection – then it makes sense to stop trying to treat it like a puzzle with some sort of clever solution. Perhaps it would instead be more appropriate simply to linger in the presence of that incongruous gap between the way the world actually is and the way we wish it to be, staring into the abyss with fearless amusement. In so doing, nihilists might extract pleasure from a situation that would otherwise only bring frustration and pain.

What makes Zapffe’s essay brilliant is his diagnosis of the human condition and the strategies individuals and societies use to fend off the troubling feelings that lay within. However, sharing his belief that human consciousness is a heavy burden does not automatically lead to sharing his belief that life must be doomed by it. The transformation of suffering and the meaning this struggle can bring are timeless themes from across human cultures, and they point toward a life philosophy that can withstand even the worst psychological suffering.

When Steve Jobs and Apple came out against DRM on music files in 2007, it permanently changed how digital music was sold. To this day, Apple, Amazon and a host of other services continue to sell DRM-free music, even with the push to streaming services.

The situation with ebooks is much different: DRM is the standard. When you buy an ebook from Apple, Amazon or any number of smaller sellers, that book is locked into the service you bought it from with limited rights for what you can do with it. I don’t want to be too dramatic, but I view this as a massive tragedy for humanity. (I’ll assume readers are familiar with the arguments against DRM. If not, the Jobs letter linked above is a good place to start.)

In practice, the situation with books is even worse than it was with music. As Jobs’ letter points out, consumers could always buy the CD and rip DRM-free mp3s. So there was always an easy way to have digital music without DRM. With books, there is no simple way to create digital copies of the books you already own.

The result is that the possible advantages of ebooks are nowhere near fully realized. Neither iBooks nor Kindle are good pieces of software and there is little incentive for Apple or Amazon to innovate. Right now I don’t even have the ability to search across all my ebooks at once. As Patrick Collison said on twitter, “Getting books onto the screen was a good first step.”

I want beautifully typeset ebooks that I can read on any device, with a vibrant ecosystem of third-party software to help me annotate, cross-reference and synthesize everything I read. The alternative ebook readers I’ve found (that can view non-DRM files) are not good at all. Which makes sense, given the smaller size of the DRM-free ebook market.

Well, let me clarify: the legal market for DRM-free ebooks is small; the black market is massive. There are websites offering several million DRM-free ebooks for open download and other sites offering tools to remove encryption from Kindle books. So once again, DRM ensures that the people who actually paid for the ebook have fewer rights than the people who downloaded a free copy from a Russian server.

As I understand it, the push for DRM primarily comes from publishers. Until they have a reason to change, it’s up to authors, readers, students, and librarians to press this issue. I don’t see Jeff Bezos or Tim Cook publishing a “Thoughts on Books” letter any time soon.

In the meantime, there are some bright spots. Standard Ebooks is working to make definitive ebook editions of public domain books. They’ve also created a set of software tools to help with the ebook creation process.