Deep Life Reflections: Friday Five
Issue 124 - Gathered
Welcome to Issue 124 of Deep Life Reflections.
I’m writing this week from Barcelona, having just visited Gaudí’s extraordinary Casa Batlló (this week’s cover image). Gaudí believed that Mediterranean people possessed a natural gift for creativity and design—an innate sense for art, colour, and originality.
In that spirit, I’m returning to a format I experimented with a couple of months ago— sharing five pieces of writing that caught my eye. Each, in its own way, feels creative, original, and worth reflecting on.
Let’s explore.
1. Ted Gioia on the folly of personal branding
“I hate the idea of treating people like brands. A person should never be reduced to a brand. People evolve and grow, while brands are built on stability and predictability. As soon as you turn into a brand, your ability to grow is constrained. That’s why I admire artists like Miles Davis or Picasso. They refused to repeat themselves. They always sought out new experiences. They didn’t take orders.”
I like this sentiment from Gioia, a jazz critic and music historian. In corporate life, we’re told to have and refine a personal brand to fit into a neat story. I watched a video this week saying if you can’t tell your story in under a hundred words, you have no story. Simply not true. A life isn’t a word count—and it’s not a brand either.
2. Jeremy Gordon on why men should read fiction
From The Real Reason Men Should Read Fiction, The Atlantic.
“Literature … allows me to occupy a place that is totally for myself, and unaccountable to other people’s expectations. The author Percival Everett is fond of noting that he considers reading to be a subversive act. “No one can control what minds do when reading; it is entirely private,” he once said. This, to me, is the best argument for why a man should read, and why he should seek new mental frontiers beyond the accumulation of information.”
The article explores the so-called decline of the male reader, and specifically the lack of fiction being read by men, particularly younger men who are continuously instructed to optimise every minute of every day. With time at such a premium, reading fiction is treated as indulgent or even a waste of time.
I spoke to a friend recently who told me he no longer reads fiction because he gets frustrated with it. Other friends only read non-fiction. But fiction is often where the best understanding of life lies. Kafka’s The Trial says everything about the bureaucratic and unfathomable systems we live in. To Kill a Mockingbird has one of the greatest male role models ever written. And as Gordon alludes to above, fiction is a gateway not just to new information, but to autonomy itself. Far from a waste of time, fiction has always changed lives—starting with our own.
3. Cormac McCarthy on the duality of humankind
From Blood Meridian.
“The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I’d have them all in zoos.
That would be a hell of a zoo.
The judge smiled. Yes, he said. Even so.”
I recently finished McCarthy’s blood-soaked western novel that mixes historical events with fiction, telling the real-life story of the notorious Glanton Gang, scalp hunters on the Mexico-Texas borderlands. At its centre is the Judge, a preternatural figure: all-knowing, toweringly gigantic, and terrifying in intellect, eloquence, and brutality—and pledged absolutely to the god of war.
The Judge embodies the duality of humankind: our capacity for knowledge, creativity, and invention at our best—and cruelty, sadism, and destruction at our worst. He is the only member of the gang to survive, symbolic of the enduring and destructive side of human nature.
McCarthy’s prose is violent and biblical, and in the Judge, he creates a character who feels both timeless and dreadful. Proof that fiction can reveal truths about human nature that facts never could.
4. Seth Godin on the future
“The future doesn’t care. It doesn’t care whether you’re excited or filled with trepidation. It arrives, regardless. What an opportunity. Or a threat. Up to us.”
As I wind down on 13 years living in the UAE, this is a helpful reminder that we still have agency in how we embrace what’s around the corner.
5. Alexander Karp on the failure of the promise of technology to improve our world
From The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.
“The modern incarnation of Silicon Valley has strayed significantly from this tradition of collaboration with the U.S. government, focusing instead on the consumer market, including the online advertising and social media platforms that have come to dominate—and limit—our sense of the potential of technology. A generation of founders cloaked themselves in the rhetoric of lofty and ambitious purpose—indeed their rallying cry to change the world has grown lifeless from overuse—but often raised enormous amounts of capital and hired legions of talented engineers merely to build photo-sharing apps and chat interfaces for the modern consumer.”
Karp writes with great clarity on the fallout of incentivising the best and brightest minds to build addictive, time-destroying apps instead of technologies that genuinely benefit society.
He argues for a renewal of purpose, urging today’s founders and engineers to direct their talents toward collective challenges—national security, infrastructure, and democratic values—rather than fleeting consumer conveniences.
It reminded me of Gaudí’s conviction that creativity is a gift with a higher purpose. Gaudí built beauty that served people and endured. Karp’s warning is that without that sense of purpose, even our brightest minds risk building empty things.
A Question for You
Has any piece of writing caught your eye this week, and if so, what made it notable?
Thanks for reading and supporting Deep Life Journey. If you have any reflections on this issue, please leave a comment here or drop me a message.
Have a great weekend. Stay intentional.
James
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