I’ve never been good at math. Ok, that’s generous, I’m actually a disaster. I don’t have the brain for it, and never did –I disliked it so much that when I was thirteen, I chose to study Latin and Ancient Greek (would not recommend) just so I could have a few less hours of math a week (not a worthy trade-off). Several of my classmates at the torture chamber that was the Classics division of my high school had made the call for similar reasons, which meant most of us sucked and our math professor was constantly at near-breakdown levels of exhaustion around us.
I’d say I feel sorry about it now, but she was also kind of mean, so you know what?
Not that sorry.
In our junior year, she tried to explain a complicated formula for some sort of equation, and no matter how hard I tried, I just didn’t get it. She spoke for an hour but by the end of it, it all sounded like gibberish to me, even worse than Greek. I raised my hand with stupid question after stupid question, until I blurted out something like it’s your job to get us to understand this stuff, and none of us are getting it! that can’t be right!
I was an entitled little shit, but I will never forget her answer. Mrs. B looked me right in the eyes and seethed, you don’t have to understand it, you just. have. to. do. it.
(She failed me that year, which shouldn’t come as a surprise)
*
I knew someone who used to buy fake designer items for the sole purpose of posting them on Instagram with a “thank you so much for the goods! @ designer” and maintaining a certain image, or, ahem, façade. It used to drive me nuts, and until I muted them forever, every time I came across their profile I just couldn’t shake the feeling that something, somewhere, had gone horribly wrong in this experiment we call the human experience.
The same is true of most of what I was asked to do (and sometimes did totally of my own volition, because I was a young and naive moron) when I was an actress. Shooting the fourteenth unpaid student film in a row? Post something like behind the scenes of a super secret new project! Had a meeting with your agent which he mostly spent singing the praises of your talented friend and blowing smoke up his own ass? That warrants an exciting things happening! stay tuned! and perhaps even an #actorslife addition, for good measure. Didn’t get into a single screening at Cannes Film Festival? No stress, you can still make it look like you did by telling everyone you went to exclusive after parties (lol) and met a lot of up-and-coming producers (slimy guys on boats who put their hands on your thigh and told you they could make you a star).
Though hilarious when I think back on it now, it was hella depressing when I was barely making enough to pay my rent and felt like death more often than not.
But the thing is, that’s how it works. It’s all good, there’s always an answer.
There’s always a PR spin, a way to stave off the dread from setting in.
There’s living as if, and then there’s delusional.
You don’t need to understand it, you just need to do it.
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Yuval Noah Harari writes that ”homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions. Ever since the stone age, self-reinforcing myths have served to unite human collectives. Indeed, Homo sapiens conquered this planet thanks above all to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions. As long as everybody believes in the same fictions, we all obey the same laws, and can thereby cooperate effectively.”
Fiction is different from ignorance, I understand that, but it’s also a different side of the same coin, isn’t it? We know ignorance is dangerous, and as we’ve increasingly seen in the last few years, ignorance mixed with pointed fiction ––stories that serve a specific purpose, fakeness that requires us all to believe in its truth–– can be lethal.
He continues: “How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away.”
You don’t need to understand it.
You just need to: get the job, buy the cars, work hard and not wonder whether you ever had the chance to opt out in the first place; have a robot read 50 books a week and summarize them in 5 sentences or less, so you can pretend you’ve read them; believe the hype and buy into whatever Next Big Thing they’re shelling this month; believe politicians whose job is literally to lie to you for a living; figure out a way to make passive income or exploit somebody else’s work and then brag about it on LinkedIn; get your news from 20-second-long TikTok videos; prepare two to three conversation starters, repeat the other person’s name every two sentences, I heard it makes them feel important; lie on your Tinder profile; tag brands on Instagram; congratulate strangers on starting their new job; invest in crypto; use a trending audio; trust that the ChatGPT bot will render every creative job obsolete / make people millionaires / save us all from the horror that is hard work and dedication.
The bros are out here tweeting that "college as we know it will cease to exist," but did you know OpenAI’s own founder doesn’t believe in his own products’ hype? Sam Altman himself (whose crypto project went silent after “numerous labor and privacy concerns” were raised) says, “ChatGPT is a preview of progress; we have lots of work to do on robustness and truthfulness.”
Truthfulness, this old thing? Oh, that’s right.
For Vice, Edward Ongweso Jr writes that ChatGPT “may pass off text as persuasive, but only because we have come to expect so little from text.” In this sense, the chatbot is “more about bullshitting than creativity, which serves as a neat metaphor for what has happened with our technology sector and how it ‘feels like a giant organ for bullshittery.’”
The Atlantic's Ian Bogost adds that "in almost every case, the AI appeared to possess both knowledge and the means to express it. But when pressed, the bot almost always had to admit that it was just making things up.”
A giant organ for bullshittery, and you don’t need to understand anything at all.
You just need to copy and paste something that can pass for an answer.
Or a human.
Or a life worth living.
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Last year, I heard the following on a podcast I found fascinating but can’t remember the name of: “It’s not fake it til you make it. It’s be it like you see it.” It’s be in the moment, not in the dream of it. It’s honesty, not actual make-believe.
It’s embodying the spirit of your most authentic self, so if all you want is to own designer items and be paid to post them on Instagram, it’s about living in that joy and that truth ––not actually posting your fake shit to your bought followers. What the hell, bro, that should be pretty obvious.
Stay in the fucking moment, in the most honest way you could possibly conjure up, ‘til every bit of inauthenticity you’re still holding onto has no choice but to go up in flames.
When I stopped acting, I vowed to eradicate fakeness from my life. Ambition for ambition’s sake had almost killed me, and the second I recognized my poorly masqueraded death wish for what it was, I couldn’t go back.
No more.
Fuck it all.
Fuck my math teacher, my old agent, and those damn ads for the world’s best books in 15 minutes, I swear to god. Fuck what’s dumbing us down instead of elevating our consciousness, fuck pretending for the sake of fitting in, fuck living in the darkness one second longer.
Because here’s the thing ––I don’t understand math and I cried most times I opened my Ancient Greek dictionary, but I do know what an epiphany feels like.
I know words, and I know they can cast powerful spells.
I want to believe, more than anything in the world, that we can still use them to understand ourselves and other people better, not just to memorize and parrot them back in order to pass a test or sell something useless.
Mrs. B, I know it’s been ten years and you don’t remember me, let alone ever even liked me, but hear me out for a moment: I do want to understand. If I can’t understand it, I’m not so interested in doing it.
Your job was not to make us memorize a formula we could have just as easily looked up online, but to teach us the life-changing ways of the equations at its very heart.
Our job is not to pass off a robot’s work as our own nor to pass as a robot ourselves, it’s to be human, out in the world. With all our human frustrations, complications, misgivings and our ridiculous wants, with everything we could be if we stopped giving in to the temptation to be anything else but ourselves.
We don’t need to understand any of it, that’s true.
It’s always easier not to.
But man, if only we did, what a world that still could be.
Recs for your weekend:
The golden age of the streaming wars has ended
Learn the art of journaling and archive your life
Trying to Live a Day Without Plastic
This Could Be a Rough Year for the Podcast Industry
What My Father’s Martial Arts Classes Taught Me about Fighting Racism
Were the Nineties really so good?
In search of a language of loss
Life snapshots
playlist: listen, I’m just a woman, standing in front of the new Shakira song, asking it to get out of my head because I seem unable to listen to anything else
book: The Appeal by Janice Hallett, as recommended by Nicole and Camille who have excellent taste
learning from: Elizabeth Gilbert on the Everything Happens podcast
cooking: Alison Roman’s farro with toasted fennel and lemon!!!
Really enjoyed this, from a fellow maths hater x
Adore this x