Jash Dholani Profile picture
Feb 6, 2024 11 tweets 3 min read Read on X
SOURCE of modern man's weakness, stupidity, and general lack of vitality?

His leisure activities

Aldous Huxley predicted the degeneracy of modern amusements in a 103 year old essay: Pleasures (1920)

Huxley on why and how to radically rewire the way you spend your free time👇🏻Image
1/ Aldous Huxley writes that pleasures must not be an escape from effort

In fact, they must be unavailable *without* effort

Why? Because when preceded by effort, pleasure reinvigorates

But when preceded by nothing, pleasure retards your brain's reward systems
2/ Regression of "entertainment"

At royal weddings, theological debates were arranged as entertainment

Logicians debated God at Prince Palatine’s engagement

Huxley: “There was a time when people indulged themselves with distractions requiring a certain intellectual effort”
3/ Huxley notes that in Elizabethan times, regular people “could be relied upon” to break into complex musical acts like madrigals or motets

People had to “exert their minds to an uncommon degree” to entertain themselves

This kept their minds SUPPLE

Normies today could never.. Image
4/ Aldous Huxley hated mass manufactured distractions

On movies:

“Countless audiences passively soak in the tepid bath of nonsense. No mental effort is demanded of them, no participation; they need only sit and keep their eyes open.”

But mental effort is NECESSARY
5/ Huxley writes that in the past, entertainment was a consequence of ACTIVE collaboration between friends, family, and neighbors

Today, these very people sit in darkness in movie theatres

And silently watch something that STRANGERS made halfway across the world...
6/ In The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond writes about African kids who make model airplanes from sticks and stones by looking at a newspaper picture

Kids in rich societies buy airplane sets from the mall

Kids’ entertainment becomes passive in advanced societies...
7/ Huxley on how tech makes us LESS creative: "Before machinery men who wanted to amuse themselves were compelled, in their humble way, to be artists. Now they sit still and permit professionals to entertain them with machinery"

"Artistic culture" dies in such an environment...
8/ In Huxley's Brave New World, the "savage" says the following to the technocrat who wants humanity happy and comfortable:

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin."

These are conditions for GROWTH Image
9/ Notice the "fort" in comfort

The Latin root of comfort means to *fortify* - to make stronger

The original sense of comfort was rest that READIES you for war. NOT lounging without aim. Aldous Huxley writes that we must return to the original meaning of the word...
Thank you for your time fren! I appreciate it

Make Leisure Great Again

Follow me for more: @oldbooksguy

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More from @oldbooksguy

May 21
For each retweet this gets

I will post a banger from an old book...

LET'S GO
1/ "Under peaceful conditions the militant man attacks himself."

(Nietzsche, 1886)
2/ "There are people who make no mistakes because they never try to do anything worth doing."

(Goethe, 1831)
Read 13 tweets
May 18
G.K. Chesterton's best book: Orthodoxy (1908)

Here are its 10 best ideas:

1/ Love precedes lovability: "Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her." Image
1/ Love precedes lovability because a "primary devotion" to a place, thing, or person is the source of the creative energy that transforms it. Begin with love, not scorn. Commitment beautifies Image
2/ Modern streets are "noisy with taxicabs and motorcars," but that's the noise of "laziness and fatigue," not activity. If everyone walked, streets would be quieter but more alive. Modern thought is like a modern street - noisiness, long words, loud ideas...hiding laziness Image
Read 12 tweets
Apr 5
You can do almost anything with a phone - and that's Bad, Actually

Because you can do anything, you end up doing nothing

The best tools are constrained and specific. They do you a favor by limiting you...

Thread:
1/ On a typewriter you cannot stream movies, check stock prices, or play online chess. You can only write. On a camera you cannot tweet, google trivia, or order groceries. You can only click. These older tools gave you a tunnel vision that their advanced alternatives just cannot
2/ If the only tool you have is a hammer, then all your problems look like nails. If the only tool you have is a 7 inch flat screen, then all your problems look like pixel arrangement problems. That is Objectively False. Real problems demand more than tapping, clicking, coding
Read 10 tweets
Mar 15
I never use AI to write

You shouldn't either

Here's why:
1/ One line from an 1883 philosophy book gets to the heart of the matter: "Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood" (Nietzsche). Writing comes not just from your brain but from your guts, balls, sinews, feelings, blood. AI has none of that
2/ Chesterton wrote in Heretics (1905) that if you want exciting art, you have to go to the ideologues. To the men who have actual convictions. Only a "doctrinaire" - someone with a doctrine, a POV, a set of values - can tell a story worth hearing. A data server has no doctrine
Read 16 tweets
Mar 11
While writing my new book, I stumbled upon an interesting pattern: many outlier success stories seem to involve...a childhood toy

Let me show you what I found

A thread: amazon.com/dp/B0DX24S1Q4
1/ Einstein fell seriously sick at 5. Bed-ridden. His father brought home a toy compass to entertain him. He was transfixed by the magnetic needle. It made him wonder—what were the "deeply hidden" forces controlling the needle...and the world? He spent his life chasing the answer
2/ The Wright brothers were gifted a toy helicopter when they were 7 and 11. They played with it until it broke, and then they built their own model. Years later they credited this toy for sparking off their life-long obsession with flight
Read 10 tweets
Mar 9
Why do old buildings and weathered objects look so much more charming than the plastic creations of our time?

Because of a Japanese concept called Koko...

Thread:
1/ Charm is a hard thing to pin down - because it is not a thing but a spirit. The Japanese have thought about it for thousands of years. In the Zen philosophy of aesthetics, there is something called "Koko" - a certain weathered but attractive vibe that old objects develop Image
2/ Older things have history - which means they have stories, details, and finally, a MYSTERY, that a newly minted factory object simply cannot possess. Japanese art critic Yanagi Sōetsu put it well: "there is...a little something left unaccounted for" Image
Read 14 tweets

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