find a mirror on my website
Growing up, lifting weights seemed the persuasion of calcium-brained Denisovans, a vestigial talent useful only for ripping thick-rinded oranges in two ugly chunks before the dexterity to peel them evolved. The atavistic Heavy Objects of the gym seem to belong in prisons or dungeons or other places that polite society has forgotten. They are counterparty to the breast implant, monuments to Fisherian runaway. I prided myself in my weakness in the same way I prided myself in my accidentally-capri sweatpants— a body as mind extension to food as fuel utilitarianism. I do not am, I just think.
Competing for the most frightening arms is competing in an arena evolution long decided you would not win. Look, there are gorillas that would love to take your skull for a thick-rinded orange. There are bears that are more than phonetically grisly. Call it arete, call it a comparative advantage: the meaning of life is clearly not strength. Or maybe I just grew up in the era of machines; born alongside cars that could move faster than nature, hydraulics that could tear gorillas like oranges. Machines so good they have become mere intellectual exercises in what better versions look like, barnumesque spectacles. “Come see a Device exert the force of every bodybuilder on earth combined on a single grape, all at once!”1 And you’re telling me to train my grip strength? Of course, it made sense to live in the mind, where there are still battles to be won. Still.
Lately I’ve been feeling like a big dumb idiot. A stupid, knuckle-dragging, heavy-ball rolling idiot. For many of my favorite intellectual pursuits, I don’t know if I’ll ever be the best. I used to be great at Fermi estimation! And more every day, I’m bad—and not for lack of practice. All this big talk about machine consciousness and no one asking what it must have been like to be a Nokia 20 years ago? To feel your obsolescence in real time?
When people ask me what I’ll do when there’s nothing left that I’m comparatively good at, I always tell them something like gardening. Almost no one grows tomatoes because they can do it better than the agrico-industrial complex; it’s more scale model than economy of scale. But it’s fun to see a thing that you put into the ground turn into something you can eat, isn’t it? Fun and oddly personal. And almost every gardener I know swears their produce tastes better, much better...
More and more I see flowers and sprouts in the human condition: the things to push not because you aspire to Schwarzeneggerian heights2 but to a backyard stapled to your sapien—thinking ape!—existence. Good thought is the ivory tower and this is the unnatural plot of dirt next to it. On its own it feels like a waste, time spent preening so obviously not furthering the climb to stratospheric tusk-y heights that it boggles the mind. But imagine a thousand ivory towers packed as a city, all climbing, and only a plot or two among them, green and budding...
Post intelligence explosion, thinking will still be delightful, but it will no longer be our comparative advantage. Our comparative advantage will be back on the savanna, in being the best creatures for each other as we were thousands of years ago — satisfying the part of your brain that is happy to be human, to be around humans. This muscle does not get worked out very often in Silicon Valley.
We should keep ourselves as gardens, water ourselves daily. Our bodies will not get optimized away by progress, not get silicated and forgotten, not for a while anyhow. I feel a shocking desire unlike any other time in my life to be the best ape I can be and not just the best mind, and I predict many people will turn to this for meaning in the future. As my thinking is reflected increasingly well in electro, I feel my body heaving against those idiot metal plates, each tendon anxious in its grip, each muscle groaning spasmodically towards the sun. Pain means progress means some little kernel of the human experience I can have to myself, something there is no financial incentive to replicate. I do not aim to compete with the hydraulic presses, just with the limits of whatever gifts I was born with.
In some ways, keeping yourself as a garden is a safeguard against the world in which the ivory towers of intellect turn Evergrande, abandoned and uninhabitable, devoid of human care.
The real atavism is not the heavy weights but the need to spend our hours meaningfully. If our days need to be building something, let it be something for progress; if our days cannot be spent for progress, let us retreat to the garden of the self and appreciate the tender tilling of our weekends and evenings. When your mind is defunct and your code doesn’t matter, you can keep the kilograms creeping like ivy...
I laugh looking at myself as a gym bro, because I still care so much more about the intellectual—but now there’s a certain joy in leaning into the whole ape thing. I feel more the blood my heart pumps and the air my lungs gasp, and a new kinship for all the sinewy creatures around me. This is what it looks like to become an atavism.
il faut cultiver notre jardin
we must cultivate our gardenVoltaire
yes, really. the best hydraulic presses are this good.
okay it’d be pretty cool to be the governor of california
thank you to Kushal Thaman, Yudhister Kumar and Mason Wang for reading drafts of this essay
this is very nice.
Tending a garden and feeling the self as body and the blood beneath your skin and it’s weightlifting over running? Shame shame shame