Space to Play I remember childhood as the slow advance of a great laboring Seriousness. When I was in middle school, an awareness began to settle on me that great beings known as “colleges” watched from afar; by high school I understood that I ought to order my life to be pleasing to them. Nobody was entirely sure what, specifically, we ought to be doing, so orthodoxy was the subject of considerable debate. When such things were discussed, Seriousness draped around our necks like lead aprons. We need Seriousness, sometimes. Seriousness is what sweeps in after tragedy, bringing rules and regulations, the eyes of good society bearing down upon you. When you’re having a good time and things start to get dangerous, Seriousness rips through the fun like a cold wind through a T-shirt. But we forget that Seriousness is a means of control, and not a very sophisticated one at that. Wonder and folly alike wither away beneath it. Seriousness is not the same thing as responsibility, though Serious people like to believe it is, and it can only create the desire to flee, not the will to chase. Seriousness is one of the feelings that settles over a competitor before a tournament—the cold understanding that the time has come to execute at the limit of what you are capable of. But if Seriousness is for operating at your limit, then why would you be anything but Serious? Because Seriousness isn’t enough. A good competitor will have a hunger, too, a desire that Seriousness is too crude to create. That drive will push them to train, to attempt to push beyond their limits, risking failure, to prepare them for the next time they need to be Serious. Training isn’t that different than being Serious, though. So why would you ever do something very un-Serious, like play? Play is for fun. Play is to preserve a piece of us that Seriousness does not understand, the feather-light joy of being swept along by life like a seed caught by a breeze. Also, every once in a while, play is for redefining the limit of your abilities entirely, or inventing whole new games. I am not the only one to lament the smothering gray creep of Seriousness into childhood and, for that matter, adulthood. But I do wonder what becomes of a society that values Seriousness to the extent that we do. Does Seriousness bring out the best in us, as we seem to believe? Or does the immense weight of the future only serve to pin us in place beneath it? A Serious society assumes there is no feather-light joy, that there are no new games to be found and no new ways to play the old ones. A Serious society believes all it can be is a slightly more optimal version of itself. Students who are Serious won’t take classes that might wreck their GPA, and they grow into adults who won’t look stupid even in front of their friends. We fossilize before we’re even dead. If the Seriousness weighs heavily enough upon a person, if their life is stable but nothing more and they live in a kind of comfortable unfeeling stupor, there is little that can shake them loose except mortality reminding them of what awaits. Perhaps that is the way to live, squeezed between life and death, shimmying between the two immensities like a climber up a chimney, but if the Reaper himself must show up to get you to attend a pottery class, something has gone horribly wrong. I played a lot of video games as a kid, and made up games with my friends, and as I got older such things often served as refuges from the Seriousness. I wonder what happens when every shelter from the distant judgmental gazes erodes away. What happens to us when no private spaces remain for us to be unskilled and uninhibited? Do we decide that we are finished with becoming and settle into being? Do we cede the world to belong only to the skilled and the shameless? Perhaps, without space to play, we do. Perhaps it is already theirs.

Care Doesn’t Scale I met a social worker whose job was to look after four orphaned children. She’d alternate with her coworkers spending 24 hours at a time living with the kids, effectively acting as their parent. The children, unsurprisingly, had a lot of trauma and so her job was certainly not an easy one, but she found it deeply rewarding and she really cared about the kids, and this way the kids—who otherwise might not have had any consistent parental or sibling figures in their lives—grew up together as a family. I was struck by how reasonable the arrangement was. If you wanted to design a social system to care for children who have lost their parents, I don’t know if you could do much better. With four children, each kid can get individual care and attention, but there were four social workers each had three 24-hour blocks per week, so they had time to have their own lives with enough flexibility to take vacations and sometimes have two workers with the kids instead of one. To get that individualized care, though, they had four social workers and four children. One-to-one. Of course, you could probably add a few more children, or subtract a social worker, as a cost-saving measure. It’d be less sustainable, but it wouldn’t significantly change the experience. But you couldn’t stray that far from one-to-one without changing the nature of the experience, without industrializing it to the point that individual care is lost. With four kids, the kids can feel like kids; if there were forty kids, they’d probably feel like they were cattle. We’re pretty limited when it comes to care. In any given moment, you can only really care deeply and individually for one person. There was some pain in that realization. So many of my utopian dreams—what if we could live in a society where everyone can get the food, the housing, the healthcare, the opportunities for growth that they deserve—come from a place of wishing that we could live in a world where people are cared for. The enormity of the scale of human suffering makes individual effort feel futile, driving people towards solutions that scale—we should build more housing, reform healthcare, reform the financial system, have a different kind of government, change the incentives, etc. Adults often come to see small-scale solutions to major problems as childish. Yeah, you could make a couple of sandwiches for the hungry—but there are billions of people who need better access to food. Maybe your effort is better spent working on solutions that can scale. So it is that children who feel bad for the guy on the street grow into college students who have strong opinions about socialism or technological development. Then something shifts again when those students graduate and start working and have kids, and suddenly they’re thinking a lot more about bibs and bottles than economic models. Some people see the waning of fervor for grand causes as a sign that people are losing hope in a better world, becoming complacent. Others see it as a natural part of getting older, as a healthy way of focusing on what they can control, of not getting lost in self-righteous hypotheticals. There’s probably some truth on both sides. But I wonder if part of that smaller focus comes from a deep realization that care doesn’t scale. Unscalability is anathema to the engineering mind. It’s weirdly terrifying to consider that you could be the CEO of a company devoted to feeding the world, spend your life developing the Food-o-Matic which can feed everyone on the planet, but if you neglect to care for your kids, then your kids just have to live with your neglect. It’s been a good opportunity to re-examine my worldview. I’ve regarded low-scale activities with a kind of casual dismissal for much of my life—not that I don’t respect or value people with occupations operating at an individual level, but I was always skeptical about pursuing such things myself because some part of me thinks “we live in a massive world in a time of massive reach. A textbook could educate thousands of people, a speech could inspire millions, great software could touch the lives of billions. Why would you choose limited pursuits when you can do something limitless? Isn’t unbounded potential for scale better than the mere individual?” Software engineering as a field is made up of people who are very conscious of missed opportunities for scale (“why isn’t there an API for this so I don’t have to call in and wait on hold for an hour?”). And that’s not a bad thing! Software has added a ton of value to the world by making things accessible to everyone that used to be accessible to only a few. Scale isn’t bad, at least not necessarily. Industrial is perfectly capable of being better than custom. Sometimes the YouTube video is more helpful than the private tutor. But there’s some part of me that twinges with a sense of insufficiency when I think about doing something small-scale. I mean, this very second I’m writing a blog post—converting these thoughts into a format conducive for consumption at scale. It can be tempting to view individualized work as something paltry or unimportant. It doesn’t help that people whose work can scale get access to fame, wealth, and power that will rarely be available to people operating at an individual level. And yeah, sometimes small-scale work is just wasted effort, the result of being too proud to see that the same result could be achieved with less work. But sometimes things can’t scale without changing. Care doesn’t really scale without becoming something else. Thinking about this has helped me reframe how I feel about things like parents looking after their children, things like my friends taking time to chat with me. It’s not that I cynically didn’t think those things were important; it’s just difficult to shake the sense that people, that I, should be doing bigger, better things. For care, though, it doesn’t get bigger and better. If your goal is to educate the world, you can look for ways to educate thousands or millions. If you want to inspire the world, the billions await. But if your goal is to care for the world, and in a given moment you’re deeply caring for one person, you’re doing the best it’s possible to do. There’s something oddly comforting about that.

‘Small Village’ of Supposedly-Deceased Intellectuals Found Alive, Thriving at Caribbean Resort Gabriel Martinez, a 35-year-old confectioner living in the Cayman Islands, thought he was posting a simple promotional photo when he snapped a picture of his ‘cocoa-banana-surprise’ and posted it to Instagram last week. Instead, he ignited a scandal still blazing its way through the publishing world when his followers noticed a gathering of prominent intellectuals sitting at a table in the background. Such a gathering—including a bestselling novelist, two Nobel prize winners, and an acclaimed journalist—was already noteworthy, but it was particularly remarkable because everyone seated at that table was, supposedly, dead. A firestorm of confusion ripped its way across social media, prompting a curious group of well-connected locals to poke around a bit. Within hours, they discovered several hundred ‘deceased’ public intellectuals enjoying posthumous sunshine and martinis at the resort. A few hours later, when the gig was clearly up, the ‘deceased’ released a statement explaining their actions, including this illuminating paragraph: “For those of us who have reached a certain level of fame, there’s a moment after you die when the public comes together to remember the significance of your work, leading to one last big sales boost for your books. We call it the ‘bucket bump’. In the past, that payday went directly to your publisher, and hopefully your family, but eventually some economists got fed up with it and started faking their deaths once they were done writing and doing speaking tours. It worked well, so these days, it’s standard practice—you’ll work with your agent and financial planner to decide the timing, and then a specialized contractor will convincingly fabricate your demise. We found a resort owner who gives us massive discounts because he wants his kids to grow up surrounded by the major intellectuals of the day, and now we usually live out the last few years of our lives here. We hope the public can empathize with the challenging predicament we face, and we regret any pain or feelings of betrayal caused by our deception.” Many people seemed unimpressed with the statement, leading some people to denounce their former favorite writers, including this indictment from an East Coast senator: “Our intellectuals, lauded for their honesty and integrity, systematically lied to us for their own financial gain. Graveyardgate is NOT a victimless crime. We needed their knowledge, their wisdom, now more than ever, and we found them huddling under a blanket.” Several dormant social media accounts, many of which still claimed that the account holder was deceased in their bios, flared back to life to disparage the remark. “I spent my career BEGGING for funding. I dipped into my own savings, delayed my retirement, to fund my work, and then LITERALLY THE DAY I DIED everyone and their mother is singing my praises and whipping out a credit card. I don’t regret any of the ‘pain or feelings of betrayal’ I caused at all. You people deserve this.” “need us now more than ever?!? excuse me?!?!? i was retired seven years before i took my bucket bump. i answered e-mails. i took interviews. this is my life’s work, i’m happy to discuss it. sometimes people reached out but mostly it was crickets. then i ‘die’ and all of a sudden it’s ‘oh she had so much more to teach us’ as if you’d been banging down my door this whole time. um no? if you cared so much about my abilities maybe you would’ve asked me to use them sometime in the past 7 years?” “It IS a victimless crime, though. You’d be surprised how many household names, people who singlehandedly reshaped the public discourse on a major issue, have cash flow problems. For a while we had a brilliant solution—decouple the public’s flurry of mourning and spending with the actual day of death. The public still mourns, I still die, just not at the same time. All the money made from selling my book is money I earned—the fact that I had to fake my death to get it is incidental. Just because the public sucks at funding research and the arts doesn’t mean we’re not allowed find solutions. Honestly, bucket bumps were an elegant way to get around a well-known problem, and I certainly didn’t mind seeing everyone say something nice about me for a change. Oh, well, guess that’s ruined now, too.” One post in particular, hastily deleted, has led to rampant speculation: “it’s not like we just stopped working either. we’ve made some serious breakthroughs here and written plenty of books. often the insights are significant enough that they’re not plausible for existing thinkers so we have to find someone new to deliver the message. you ever seen someone have a book that’s absolutely brilliant and their subsequent work is hot garbage? yeah. odds are the first one was us.”

The Controversial Aftermath of the 777Linguine Interview Longtime fans of popular EDM “angststep” artist 777Linguine are “shocked” and “betrayed” after his polarizing statements yesterday that his latest album, NOMORETEARS2CRY, was written and recorded in a time of “profound mental peace”. “My first two albums came from a really unhealthy place,” 777Linguine said in an interview with MetroKnowEm. “I was hurting and I turned to music to express that pain. But the past few years have been really good for me, and I’ve made a lot of progress, you know? I’ve been able to let go of the resentment that fueled those first albums without losing my love for the music itself. But that meant I needed a new approach for my newest album, so I started writing songs based on memories of the pain I used to feel. It was weirdly fun to express that anger through my vocals because it doesn’t feel real, it doesn’t hurt me anymore. I’m just so happy and grateful now, every day, to be alive.” His interview proved unpopular among many of his most dedicated fans. “It’s honestly disgusting,” one fan said. “If you’re going to make music, you should mean it, okay? You’re lying to, like, millions of people just for money. This is a disgrace.” Other fans took to X (formerly Twitter) to express their discontent. One such fan, whose username has been angststep is dead since the release of the interview, said “art is supposed to be about expressing urself. loved singing NOMORETEARS2CRY in the car. felt heard, understood. but it wasnt real. cant even listen to his early albums without remembering. #saveangststep #impasta” One of the other biggest creative voices in angststep, BEDTHEOFSIDEWRONG, called out 777Linguine directly in a jam session stream on Twitch. “If you want to make an album while you’re healing, I could understand that,” he said. “It’s raw, it’s ragged, it’s a story. It’s hopeful, sure, but that real underlying darkness is still there. But if you’re all happy and healed now, then frankly, this genre isn’t about you anymore. Go record some New Age whalesong meditation and play it for your yoga class. The rest of us are moving on.”

Not As Giants Love Short story, ~2000 words A week ago, when I asked you if you still loved me, I thought the most painful thing you could’ve said was no. I don’t know if you remember, but when you said “Of course I still love you” and asked if I still loved you, I started to step forward as I said that I did. I thought it was the moment of reunion. I thought I was about to hold you again. I don’t think I can express how I felt when you said “I don’t believe you.” Well, you know what came next. I tried a torrent of words to convince you of my feelings, all of them useless. I didn’t reach you. You said you needed to sleep. I stayed up another three hours after you went to sleep. That night was the worst one. I couldn’t have imagined how quickly my resentment would grow. You wanted too much, I thought. You wanted a love more steady, more sure, than I could ever provide. This is real life, and people are imperfect, and I was trying, after all, and it’s not like you never hurt me. By the time I finally accepted that I needed to rest, I was furious. It’s for the best you pretended to be asleep when I went to bed. I calmed down a bit after that, but for days all I could think of was how I could prove it to you. I dreamed up exotic vacations, perused expensive gifts, tried to think of a promise I could make to you that would convince you of my conviction. Every idea felt somehow both too grandiose and not good enough. The promises felt melodramatic, because both of us have learned through bitter experience that my words don’t always survive being put to the test. I was afraid nothing I could say would give you solace. I thought you were demanding perfection, and I knew myself better than to believe I wouldn’t fail again. You started going to bed early, and I started staying up late, writing the first two iterations of what would become this letter. The first was angry, and the second was a plea, begging you to please, please just accept me, flawed as I am. I told myself that Lucille wouldn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, that she was just a teenager, but the way she forced conversations at dinner and started making a point to go out with her friends in the evenings left me with little doubt that she could see more than we’d wanted her to. I can’t fault her for trying to spend time away from home. She was terrified and didn’t know what to do. I felt the same way. It hurt, though, that she retreated. It hurt that she found solace with her friends and not her father. It hurt that she talked to you about it and not me—I know she did, and I’m glad one of us could support her, because I’m sure she needed it, but it still hurt. It’s pathetic, but I found myself wishing for a catastrophe, some great threat, some common enemy. I played out elaborate fantasies of what we’d do if we found out Lucille secretly had an abusive boyfriend or something, or if there were some kind of natural disaster. Suddenly, everything would become clear. You wouldn’t doubt my love then, if I just had the chance to show it. For days, I couldn’t stop thinking about scenarios like that, where you’d need a husband and Lucille would need a father. So many stories about fathers place their families in danger—now I understand why. Those stories are outlets for the desperate care that thrashes within us. In that moment, I felt I could not express that extraordinary care without correspondingly extraordinary circumstances. I begged for a storm so I could protect you from its winds. Love, I called it. Love, that surge of yearning fondness that I choke on when I think of you, when I think of the life we have built together, when I think of Lucille growing up and us growing old together. I spent days in a tumble-dryer of self-righteousness. If only she knew, I thought, then she wouldn’t be so dismissive. If she knew the fervor with which I burned, the overwhelming self-sacrifice of my imagination, she would never doubt. I wanted that fervor to be love. I wanted it to be enough. Then, two evenings ago, in the midst of these heroic fantasies, I walked past the dishwasher—clean and ready to be emptied—and I barely even noticed. Some part of me knew you’d take care of it in the morning. I was dimly aware that something was strange about that sequence of events, something was wrong, and then a little thought scurried through my mind, the kind of thought that seems insignificant until you pick it up to examine it and suddenly you can’t think of anything else: who was I kidding? Who was I kidding—I’d take a bullet for you? I wouldn’t even take out the trash for you. What kind of love was I offering, where in my mind I crossed oceans to remain by your side, but here you were, right next to me, and I was letting you slip away? I could imagine myself facing down torture and death for you, but the story always ended with you apologizing to me. I told myself stories where I was larger than life so I wouldn’t have to face my feelings of being weak, mistrusted, and insufficient. I could not bear to see myself as the flimsy thing I am. Gradually, painfully, I came to see what I’d been doing. I tried to tell myself that I hadn’t changed, that I was still just as committed to our relationship as ever, but it was only half true. I hadn’t changed, not exactly. I had…eroded. How? When people ask me when I knew that I was in love with you, I never know what to tell them, so I tell them when the first domino fell and set in motion all that followed. On our fourth date, there was this moment when you’d rushed ahead to beat me to the glade, and you turned to look back at me, excited and a little nervous, like you weren’t completely sure that I was coming. A little piece of my chest lurched towards you, and it never fell back into place. I knew I never wanted you to look behind you and not see me following. From then on, that was what I thought of when I thought of you. You were that golden girl, framed by sunlight and joy, with your nervous smile and the slight bounce in your step and the lurch in my chest. And even now, sometimes, you’ll make that nervous smile, and it all comes flooding back—the feelings, the vows, and I’m reminded of why I chose this in the first place. But sometimes, you’re not smiling like that. Sometimes you’re forgetting to clean your shoes when you come back in from the garden, or you’re trying too hard to be upbeat when I’m down, or you’re going all quiet, shutting me out when I’m trying to talk. And it’s not just you. I would’ve said I loved Lucille as soon as we found out you were pregnant, but it was all so academic at that point. I didn’t really get it until she was two weeks old and you were asleep and I was holding her, and I looked at her and she just stared at me and I couldn’t look away. Your eyes. My little golden girl, who needed me to look after her, clothe her in diapers until she could clothe herself in sunlight and joy like you. And a minute later, she was screaming bloody murder and a month later I was cleaning up a blown-out diaper and a decade and a half later she was giving me one of her lectures about what would be fair and I was about ready to throttle her— and when I was tired or annoyed or just sad, I started to play this horrible little eroding game. In the game, I’m a giant. In the game, I’m married to another giant, the golden girl, and we have a giant child, Lucille, the baby staring at me with the golden girl’s eyes. You and Lucille aren’t giants. You’re life-sized, and I didn’t say my vows to you, I said them to a giant clothed in sunlight. In the game, my daughter is a giant with piercing eyes, not a sarcastic teenager who speaks with certainty about societal systems she has not even experienced, let alone understood. Every once in a while, something happens—maybe Lucille is curled up reading comics on the couch with the blanket wrapped around her and her nose is all scrunched up from laughter and suddenly she’s that child again, the magic of the moment grows her to colossal proportions and she’s my beloved baby girl. Sometimes you say just the right thing or the light catches you just right and you are the golden giant once more, and I love you, and everything is as it should be. In the game, I’m the perfect husband, because whenever I am with my rightful giant family, I treat them with all the tender love they deserve. As for you and Lucille as you really are, human-sized, well, that’s not really my responsibility. The rules of my game say I don’t have to love you until I catch another glimpse of the best of you. It hurt to come to those conclusions. It hurt to accept what I had been doing, and when I saw how I’d been treating you, I felt pathetic. I shrank back into myself, and everything I did became this tragic demonstration of just how horribly unworthy of you I was. It took a while to recognize that my whole self-loathing performance was simply a dark reflection of the same problem. If I am perfect, I am not required to change; if I am worthless, fundamentally flawed beyond salvage, then I am not capable of change. The darkest depths of self-hatred, miserable as they were, were little more than an avoidance pattern. I only hated myself and deemed myself unworthy because it was easier than the terrifying alternative—that I had always been capable of loving you, but I just hadn’t. I’m afraid that it’ll be too hard to love you like you deserve. That I’ll struggle and fall short and there will be nothing left for us. But I’m even more afraid that it’ll be easy, and that you’ll have suffered for years because I let myself pretend that love was nothing more than holding a ball of longing in my chest. I’m sorry. I emptied the dishwasher. I cleaned up the office like I said I would, and mopped the floor for good measure. I paid some bills, did some laundry. I bought you flowers. Small things, I know. But perhaps that’s for the best. Small things are beneath the attention of giants. Giants love in grand gestures, in scenes from my martyr fantasies: they rescue their daughters from madmen while the cameras roll, they carry their loved ones across war zones. But giants aren’t real. Even the greatest among us live human lives, and are made gargantuan later by history and narrative. We are not giants, we only pretend to be. We ‘love’ by trying to wave away the clouds, imagining they will disperse, imagining we have saved our loved ones from the rain. We ‘love’ by wasting our lives away, awaiting a suitably giant moment. In the unlikely event that such a moment arrives, we are humbled, not vindicated. So I was wrong when I said that chores were small things. I thought emptying the dishwasher was a small way to express my love, but I was the perfect size for it—small enough to handle the utensils, big enough to reach the cupboards—so it wasn’t small at all. They say that life is about the little things, but I don’t believe that anymore. Quiet moments of joy and beauty aren’t small, either, they’re human-sized. Maybe the things that matter only seem little because we’ve convinced ourselves that we are titans. After I bought the flowers, I talked with Lucille about her difficulties at school. It went much better than usual. I want to believe that means something. If you’re willing, I’d like to talk with you, too.