[Antifragile 4 🔥] Introducing deep thoughts 🌊, The Land of Cockaigne, Mike Posner reflects, C.S. Lewis on favorable conditions & a note to myself on digital blankies

#53: a weekly 4-item newsletter created to inspire dads to use the challenges of fatherhood as fuel for building an incredible life & an antifragile mind.

Welcome to the 53rd edition of the antifragile 4 🔥.

The world of philosophy has begun to fascinate me. The Philosophize This! podcast was my gateway drug, and I very quickly fell into some wonderful rabbit holes. Wonderful yet complex rabbit holes.

This is why I’m reserving a bullet each week to dive headlong into what I’m calling [deep thoughts 🌊]. Because writing is how I think. And there’s a lot of thinking to be done on these topics.

Writing is how we find out what we believe.

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

This is my opportunity to parse challenging ideas and (hopefully) provide quality fodder for your own intellectual wanderings.

It’s also a step away from easy dopamine hits and towards meaningful work. Something I go into below.

As always, I hope you enjoy.

And I hope that elevates your life as a parent, a partner, and a human being.

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Here’s this week’s antifragile 4 🔥:

1. [deep thoughts 🌊] Peter Bruegel’s 🖼️ eerily prescient painting from 1567

2. Mike Posner 😊 reflects on “I Took a Pill in Ibiza” 10 years later

3. C.S. Lewis ✍️ on favorable conditions

4. a note to myself on digital blankies 👶🏻

+ AI Image of the Week 🤖 🎨

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1.) Peter Bruegel’s 🖼️ eerily prescient painting from 1567

This is the Land of Cockaigne by Peter Bruegel, painted in 1567. I discovered this painting via the Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Han.

In the Middle Ages, Cockaigne was known as a “mythical land of plenty,” but many believe he created the image as a commentary on the Dutch society in which he lived, which was, at the time, the wealthiest in the world.

His message was spiritual emptiness rooted in effortless abundance.

• The prone figures, representing the different classes of society (soldier, scholar, laborer), are not relaxing but rather in a mindless stupor. The tools of their trades (lances, quills, plows) lie unused.

• Everything that surrounds them is consumable & convenient - the cactus is made of bread, the roof is made of pies, the fence is made of sausages, the roast bird scoots itself closer to them, as a man eats his way through a cloud made of pudding in the background.

Today’s world makes Cockaigne look quaint; DoorDash, Amazon, Netflix, iPhones, TikTok, Instagram, Porn, Crypto, PlayStation, Spotify, McDonald’s, ChatGPT, Google.

Never before has there been so much effortless abundance.

To quote the philosopher Bo Burnham, “Could I interest you in everything, all of the time?”

And never before has there been such a crisis of purpose and meaning. Spiritual emptiness.

This piece has instead begun to resemble less a painting of a mythical land and more of a mirror reflecting our modern world.

The more convenient and pleasurable our lives get, the less meaning they offer. The further we slip into food or media or technology-induced stupors, the less able we are to engage with the real world.

The less we’re able to engage in fulfilling efforts, boring efforts, unproductive (in the economic sense) efforts, meaningful efforts. Like asking someone out, reading hard books, making art of our own, or thinking deeply about the world we occupy (and taking action on it).

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.”
Neil Postman

Rather, we begin to occupy an existence where we jump from one pleasure to another. From one headline to another. One dopamine hit to another. Without ever stopping to take a breath in between.

Pleasure without purpose. A permanent stupor. We become the men lying on the ground.

Unless…

Unless we use these beautiful brains to do something about it.

…

These are things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

• How, in a world that is increasingly convenient and easy, can we still find meaning? What needs to be removed? What needs to be added?

• How can I offer that path for my children, who will be dealing with an exponentially more convenient world?

These may be among the greatest questions of our generation 🤔.

2.) Mike Posner 😊 reflects on “I Took a Pill in Ibiza” 10 years later

You may have heard the song I Took a Pill in Ibiza by Mike Posner sometime in the last decade. It has 2+ billion streams on Spotify.

It’s catchy af, but so sad. He’s grasping for meaning after hitting it big at a young age. Trying to fill the hole with drugs and money, not able to hold down a relationship, not sure where he belongs in the world. By his own account a brutal time.

In the years since, he’s had quite a renaissance. I put him in a newsletter last year after hearing about it.

That’s part of what made his recent reflection on the song so cool.

10 years later, and after a lot of soul-searching, he revisits each line of the song and compares his life then to his life now.

My favorite line:

Became inspiring to myself first, as a byproduct became inspiring to others.

mikeposner

A post shared by @mikeposner

Thanks to fellow antifragile dad Dave L for the rec!

3.) C.S. Lewis ✍️ on favorable conditions

There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarrelling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs.

If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable.

Favourable conditions never come.

C.S. Lewis

4.) a note to myself on digital blankies 👶🏻

Hiiiiiiii bud 👋

How are ya?

You look good.

Just wanted to drop in with a little note because…I’ve been watching you.

Not in a creepy way.

Just in a “we share a brain” kind of way.

And I’ve noticed that every time stress starts to creep in - whether it's a slow sales day, a fight with Jenna, or one of your beautiful children karate-chopping the other in the cranium - you reach for your digital blankie.

Phone. iPad. Laptop. Whatever glows and scrolls.

You start scrolling like you're gonna find salvation in the next tweet.

Spoiler: you won’t.

I totally get it, too. Avoidance feels good. Dopamine feels great. But only for like... two seconds. Then it just makes everything worse. It weakens the parts of your brain that you (we) need to be strong.

So here’s the ask:
Feel the thing.
Don’t run.
Don’t numb.
Just be in it. Breathe through it.
It’s ok to feel bad sometimes.
You’ve done (WAY) harder things.

You don’t need to escape your life. It’s actually a really good one. Even when it’s chaotic. I know (because I’m you) that you wouldn’t trade your life for anyone’s.

Even when someone’s crying and someone else is bleeding and you’re questioning every decision you've ever made.

You're doing great.
Put the phone down.
Come back to now.

I love you,
Chris

AI Image of the Week 🤖 🎨

The modern Land of Cockaigne.

Two last things for you this week:

1. Leave the Land of Cockaigne. What can you add or remove to pull yourself out of a stupor?

2. Be fire and wish for the wind 🔥

With love,
Chris

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