“Basic dynamic in life: there is nothing meaningful enough to make you happy that could not make you sad if you lost it. This is the paradox of feeling, and it’s inherent and existential. If things inspire real positive emotion in you then they are necessarily things in which you are sufficiently invested that you would feel negative emotions when they’re gone. One of the fundamental choices that you face on Earth is the degree to which you’ll pursue deeper but riskier fulfillment or practice avoidance that exempts you from bad feelings but leaves you bereft of good ones. We all move in one direction or the other, from one day to another, certainly including me, but it feels to me as if our society is decidedly embracing the latter. Depth and intensity of feeling risk too much; Xbox and hard seltzer and HR culture anesthetize. Pop culture soothes and placates with a steady series of uncomplicated morality tales in predigested narratives where nothing ever really changes and so there’s no worry that the storyline will move in a way that hurts your feelings. Crowdsourced “content” is built on ephemerality. Ask a TikTok megafan, someone who’s totally unapologetic and proud about their love of the service: what’s a TikTok that you still come back to, a year later, two years later, three? I think the honest answer is “none.” Because like so many other things in our culture, those videos are designed to be thrown away. They can’t hurt you, but they can’t move you. They’ll never challenge you, and they’ll never inspire you. All they’re meant to do is help you pass the seconds that make up your life, a finite and precious resource.”