Do Not Be Governed by Chance

The periodic movements of the universe are the same, up and down from age to age. And either the universal intelligence puts itself in motion for every separate effect, and if this is so, be thou content with that which is the result of its activity; or it puts itself in motion once, and everything else comes by way of sequence in a manner; or indivisible elements are the origin of all things.- In a word, if there is a god, all is well; and if chance rules, do not thou also be governed by it.

 "Having" Mode and "Being" Mode

The American essayist and biographer Agnes Repplier saw leisure as necessary for the completion not just of individuals but of civilizations. Leisure, she noted, “has a distinct and honorable place wherever nations are released from the pressure of their first rude needs, their first homely toil, and the rise of happier levels of grace and intellectual repose.” She believed that every investment and allowance should be made to support a leisure class—a fortunati—not so that its member...

 Leisure is an End That Can Only Be Enjoyed Without Burdens

But even when the work ethic reigns supreme, leisure holds a potent moral valence. Although we may not have much say over how we make money, we do have a choice about what we do in our free time. If work represents is, leisure represents ought: How we choose to use it will either embody our understanding of the good life or reveal the depth of our degradation. What is time well spent? Philosophers and social critics have long pondered variations of that question and offered rather consistent ...

 We Make Life Short by Dissipating It

Seneca observed that “we do not receive a life that is short, but rather we make it so,” by dissipating it in “extravagance and carelessness.” How better to describe the contemporary leisure experience? Americans spend, on average, more than three hours per day—more than 60 percent of their “leisure” time—watching TV and scrolling through social media (often at the same time). “All boats are rising here,” boasts entertainment mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg. “More people are wa...

 The Culture that Create Abundance has Difficulty Enjoying It

All were expressing a leisure ethic: a worldview in which a preference for free time and intrinsically motivated pursuits is accompanied by an understanding of how time can best be spent. To most people today, the notion of a leisure ethic will sound foreign, paradoxical, and indeed subversive, even though leisure is still commonly associated with the good life. More than any other society in the past, ours certainly has the technology and the wealth to furnish more people with greater freedo...

 The Problem of Leisure

Over a decade of writing and thinking about modern work and its opportunity costs, I have generally mentioned the “problem of leisure” only in passing, largely because I would like to believe that it is soluble. Yet the political situation in the United States (and some other industrialised democracies) demands a reckoning, and it cannot be understood without reference to misspent leisure. Not only have working hours steadily declined over time, but most work (all those “non-essential�...

 How Capitalists Use the Language of Cults

In her book, Montell offers evidence that these linguistic tactics have seeped out from cults and into wider society. Propelled by capitalist demands and the reach of social media, the language of cults, she says, is now everywhere. If you question the business model of a multi-level marketing scheme, well, that's just "stinkin' thinkin'," a thought-terminating cliche popular with MLMs like Amway. Similarly, when the predictions of QAnon and other conspiracy theorists don't come to pass, foll...

 Evaluating ChatGPT as a Bullshit Machine

The structure of the paper is as follows: in the first section, we outline how ChatGPT and similar LLMs operate. Next, we consider the view that when they make factual errors, they are lying or hallucinating: that is, deliberately uttering falsehoods, or blamelessly uttering them on the basis of misleading input information. We argue that neither of these ways of thinking are accurate, insofar as both lying and hallucinating require some concern with the truth of their statements, whereas LLM...

 Corporations Controlling Culture

Corporate interests, alongside changes in media distribution, are eroding the public’s ability to construct and access its own cultural record. As more digital content is being provided to individuals, libraries, and archives solely through streaming and temporary licensing deals, rather than through permanent ownership, cultural objects such as sound recordings, books, television shows, and films are at constant risk of being removed from platforms without ever being archived. This means t...