Deep Life Reflections: Friday Five
Issue 148 - Eden
Welcome to Issue 148 of Deep Life Reflections, where each Friday I share reflections on how to live more deeply—through literature, cinema, culture, and the daily throes of life.
This week, I’ve collected five pieces of writing that each reveal something about the world we live in today. The thread running through them is this idea of presence versus absence, in all its forms.
Let’s begin as we explore this week’s Friday Five.
1.Trash and Treasure
I’ve followed Cal Newport’s work for years. His thinking on focus, digital minimalism, and deep work has had a major influence on my own approach to attention and depth. In this short essay three days before Christmas, he considers the rise of TikTok and the flood of low-quality, addictive content it represents. However, rather than default to the usual doom narrative, Newport draws a historical parallel with the paperback revolution of the 1940s, which critics claimed would lead to a “flood of trash” that would herald the death of the more serious hardback titles that had long defined publishing. It didn’t happen.
Newport’s point is that shallow content and serious work can coexist. It’s an optimistic and hopeful take. One I certainly hope proves true.
“Just because a certain type of low-quality media becomes immensely popular doesn’t necessarily mean that the deeper alternatives will suffer. Over one billion TikTok videos will be viewed today, and yet, you’re still here, reading a speculative essay about media economics. I don’t take that for granted.”
And to stay meta, you’ve chosen to read this.
2. Reading as a Vice
Adam Kirsch is a writer unafraid to say the unpopular thing. In this recent essay, he argues that reading should be framed not as a civic virtue, self-improvement, or even democratic duty (as some educators and policy makers have tried to do in recent years) but as a personal indulgence, something closer to a vice. Trying to persuade people to read more (or at all) because reading is good for society, for democracy, for yourself, doesn’t actually persuade anyone at all.
“When literature was considered transgressive, moralists couldn’t get people to stop buying and reading dangerous books. Now that books are considered virtuous and edifying, moralists can’t persuade anyone to pick one up.
“If we want to keep reading from going extinct, then the best thing we could do is tell young people what so many great writers readily admit: Literature doesn’t make you a better citizen or a more successful person. A passion for reading can even make life more difficult. And you don’t cultivate a passion for the sake of democracy. You do it for the thrill of staying up late to read under the covers by flashlight, unable to stop and hoping no one finds out.”
I’ve long believed there are books to suit everyone’s tastes. When we taste something we like, it’s a pleasurable experience. We should indulge more.
3. Steinbeck’s Ghosts
Staying on literature, one of the books I’m currently indulging in is East of Eden, John Steinbeck’s vast, sprawling novel about two families whose fates intertwine in California’s Salinas Valley in the early part of the twentieth century. In the opening chapters, Steinbeck offers a sharp and unsentimental observation about the Irish (one of the families emigrates from Ireland).
Steinbeck was of Irish descent himself and I wonder if this particular line reflects a kind of knowing self-mockery (rather than a stereotype), as well as a bullet of truth shaped by his own life experience: he attended college but never graduated; he went to New York as a writer but failed. He was both present and absent. Whatever the origin, the prose is an example of why Steinbeck remains one of America’s great writers.
“The Irish do have a despairing quality of gaiety, but they also have a dour and brooding ghost that rides on their shoulders and peers in on their thoughts. Let them laugh too loudly, it sticks a long finger down their throats.”
4. Dinner, Delivered
Ellen Cushing recently wrote a convincing essay on how technology—specifically delivery apps—has pulverised restaurant culture. Her geographic focus is America, but the trend is spreading. Cushing highlights the human loss when eating moves from relational to transactional. In 2024, nearly three out of every four restaurant orders in the U.S. were not eaten in a restaurant, according to the National Restaurant Association. Yet restaurants are among the few places left where people can come together, socialise, and be taken care of. That social centre is massively dissolving as Cushing writes.
“If communities used to clench like a fist around their restaurants, now they look more like an open palm, fingers stretched out as far as possible, or at least to the edge of the delivery radius.
“I love restaurants. They feel very real to me. They operate in physical space and linear time. They are made of things you can see and touch and smell and taste. They have people in them. They surprise me. Part of what makes them feel special is the feeling of being taken care of—all this work made visible, even if it is also elegant and subtle.
“Tech companies are kind of the opposite. They’re abstract. They are very good at hiding the effort, and the people, involved. The product that delivery companies offer isn’t food or even hospitality; it’s convenience you don’t need to think too much about. It’s all externality—costs, to the environment and the community and the labor force, atomized into the air in such a fine mist that you can barely see it.”
I don’t have the data, but in Spain, at least in Murcia, the city where I live, it feels different. Delivery apps exist, but the (many) restaurants are hives of life, often with queues stretching around the corner. The food is wonderful of course, but what’s more telling is that lunch or dinner often lasts hours. Murcia is a clenched fist.
5. A World Without Hitchens
“What I wouldn’t give to hear Hitchens let loose on the fools of today.”
A comment posted under a YouTube video of the brilliant and courageous British writer and debater Christopher Hitchens, who died of cancer in 2011.
In those fifteen years without his voice, scrutiny, and masterful put-downs, the world is a poorer place.
A Question for you
Have you ever rediscovered the value of something you thought technology had replaced?
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