How to Be a Human in a Post-Truth World

On Attention Regulation and other Soft Skills for the Apocalypse

Mar 10, 2024

Write With Me!

I’m starting the process of writing book #3—which means, first, writing a proposal. (If you want your book distributed via a legacy publisher, you need an agent; to get an agent, you need a good proposal.)

I’d love some company. Seriously. PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. Sign-ups are now underway for the first-ever cohort of my Nonfiction Writing Class! We will be writing—guess what—proposals! And you’ll get:

Five live classes (and access to the recordings, ad infinitum)
Worksheets (including seven real proposals that we’ll be analyzing)
Access to weekly cowriting sessions for a year (paid subscribers will also get those! look for an email soon!)
Everyone in the first cohort will get lots of hands-on help. Seriously. HELP ME HELP YOU.

When done well and thoughtfully, it’s a helpful blueprint for what you want the next few years of your life to be about.1 My next book idea:

Image by Midjourney with help from KS and Adobe Illustrator

Everything I’ve been reading lately seems to fall into one of these categories:

The world is ending
Here are some life hacks

It makes perfect sense, right? In the face of bad things that we cannot control, we need to steer clear of death and focus on what we can do. That’s the mentally healthy response, at least. And it has a name:

The Fine Art of Attention Regulation

One thing I’ve been trying to do with The Starr Report is write about against-the-grain truths, from my own perspective. Ya know, “here’s what they’re not telling you!!”, but with less of a conspiracy vibe. Now, I realize that one of the reasons people don’t write about all of this cumulative crap is the mental toll it takes. Chronic stressors, truly, are death by 1,000 cuts.

I still get emails about my essay, “The Cumulative Impact of Having the Wrong Name.”2 I appreciate them.“Thank you so much, it’s not just me!!” gives me warm fuzzies for validating someone else’s experience. (Side note: it’s never just you.) The problem with writing and researching about how much my work and time are devalued is that it’s fucking depressing and demotivating.

Here are some examples of things done well:

The healthy way to write about shittiness, imo

Kirsten Powers’ “The way we live in the United States is not normal” reminded us that expensive health care, the permanent anxiety of hustle culture, fear of gun violence, disjointed communities: these things are not normal, simply what we’re so used to that it’s hard to imagine life any other way—you learn to love the hand that feeds you, even if it’s just giving you scraps and slapping you silly.

Self-care is late-stage capitalism’s solution to the problem it created. How convenient that after turning your neck into a tangle of knots or creating pathological levels of anxiety and exhaustion, the “solution” is for you to spend money you don't have so you can just feel normal.

Please share with someone else who is tired:

See that? Huh! That’s more of a ‘personal insight connected to larger insight about late-stage capitalism’ kind of thing. So when we tired souls take a break from hustling, we inevitably turn to pixels. Oh, the pixels. I’ve been ~~mildly~~ obsessed with Midjourney for a year and use ChatGPT for help organizing tasks and such.3 It’s really quite amazing at producing mediocre content.

And the inevitable result of this glut of AI-generated content is to distort our sense of reality. Uncanny valley is becoming the new normal.

Unfortunately for all 8.1 billion of us, this non-reality informs our reality. Humans brains are fucking great — but unfortunately they’re increasingly filled with mush. And then we go out and do things like vote. We decide on women’s reproductive rights and climate change. We buy guns; we educate our children.
And we wonder why despite being the most evolved species on the planet we’re also the dumbest; becoming willfully blind, ultimately creating a planet that’s so increasingly deranged we’ll have no choice but to retreat even further into the fog.

AI is churning out junk, much the opposite of this must-read essay by Erik Hoel, chronicling the eerie world of AI-generated YouTube videos to the fact that Sports Illustrated was caught publishing AI-generated stories by FAKE WRITERS. Because, you know, clicks.

The inevitable progression of a culture in which everything is designed to get our attention is a non-stop thrum: our bodies and minds are unable to rest or pay attention. It’s what happens when two people stand up at a concert, forcing the people behind them to stand up so they can see, and on and on until everyone’s standing and tired but no one has a visual advantage. It all starts with the grabbing of attention, with those people in the front standing, with a world so chaotic that wearing colors you like gets reframed as “dopamine dressing,” which Ted Gioia’s dopamine culture essay brilliantly dissects. Under the umbrella of this downwards progression, Cory Doctorow wrote about the “enshittification” of online platforms like Facebook, summarized thusly:

First, [platforms] are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

That is: online dating platforms used to be places where people could meet each other. Slowly, over time, they have become apps full of bots and overly-filtered glamour shots charging users micropayments for the potential to get noticed, or forcing hefty subscriptions for the privilege of potentially interacting with someone who has shown interest. They exist, but their faces are blurry! Don’t you want to see??

AI Collapse and the Mental Collapse

YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder recently posted a video on the potential of an AI collapse. The premise is roughly this: AI has unfathomable processing power, but it’s not omniscient. In fact, it’s still learning! And it’s learning all of the information that we’re feeding it. However, this data is both inevitably incomplete and lacks both the context and perspective that humans at least have the chance to learn. AI just learns. And now it’s learning shitty things. Now it’s imagining patterns that don’t really exist (hallucinations).

The more that people use AI to create new content, the higher the risk that future AIs will be fed data that they have produced themselves… the more AI eats its own output, the less variety it has. (Sabine Hossenfelder)

Screenshot from Scientists warn of AI collapse

To wit: On the left are real photographs of elephants that were fed to an AI. On the right are photos that the AI spit out after training: a bunch of lookalikes, with the occasional dual-trunked elephant. Algorithms aimed at parsing the magic of a good elephant photo will never be able to create a truly original, groundbreaking composition, an adjacent possible: it simply doesn’t have the input to do so.

AI is turning out averages, or statistically probable sequences. It doesn’t know what a trunk “means,” just that it’s a shape near the elephant’s head, which may appear as double if two elephants are standing near each other. (Not knowing how hands actually function is why AI-generated hands are famously weird.)

So… what’s going to happen with AI? No one knows. Right now, we’re watching bad kid’s videos and multi-trunked elephants. What is this going to do to our brains, over time? Prolonged Instagram use gives us a distorted self-image: it’s not easy to keep our immediate environment in perspective and realize how vast and diverse things really are.

Prolonged AI use is going to be like prolonged porn use (which I researched for a Seattle Weekly cover story on video game testing): when you are constantly spoonfed the most extreme versions of things, the outliers and climaxes and close-up shots of elephants, you lose perspective. You don’t realize how magical it is to see one in person, far and smelly.

Writing about shitty things is exhausting

Pointing at the two-trunked elephants? Fine. Hey, this is interesting! Let’s talk! Let’s build a community! Why, yes! That’s great. But in my quest to buck the status quo, I ended up turning this newsletter into something odious: a rumination-filled bitchfest. Writing about SHITTY THINGS PERSONALLY AFFECTING ME RIGHT NOW, I now realize, is not good for my mental health. Chris Guillebeau’s Year of Mental Health has it right, as does The Art of Noticing and Culture Study.

For example: am I freaking out about money right now? YES. SO MUCH YES. But I don’t want to subject anyone else or myself to a lengthy missive about all of the woes I’ve had with work lately—being told to dress professionally for a volunteer Zoom workshop I gave a nonprofit, dropping out of a TEDx event, and being asked to work without pay for the federal government because they didn’t have a budget to work with me.

To repeat: after a year of emailing about possibly giving a workshop and helping them get their heads around numbers, even before I mentioned a concrete dollar amount, the federal government claimed to not have any money.

Such is life—but that’s not all of life. Resilience, as a process, starts with our attention:

An inability to let that shit go and writing about all of that crap—because “no one else was”—has been contributing to my personal process of Larry David-ification, and that is not the energy that I want to bring into the world, because then it’s just another piece of negativity muddying the waters.

Resilience is a process

Surviving and thriving in an unpredictable environment means that we need to control what we can. We need to take responsibility for the quality and type of information that we’re letting into our lives.

As an appreciation for you letting me into yours, and a nod to the fact that we’re all f-ing stressed and don’t need any more us vs. them crap, I am hereby relaunching The Starr Report as Soft Skills for the Apocalypse: How to Be a Human in a Post-Truth World, data and cultural commentary in the service of nourishment, delight, resilience, creation, thriving, and whimsy.

Thanks for reading! If you liked this, forward to someone who’d like it. You can also buy me a coffee, or subscribe to my newsletter. I’m also on Instagram and LinkedIn. This post may contain affiliate links.

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I worked with Chip Heath everyday for three years, my friends—and I learned things.

Over time, this disparity in being chosen for bigger platforms/opportunities/deemed valuable adds up and gets amplified. We listen to female thought leaders when they talk about vulnerability, introversion, relationships, or happiness, but the larger, macro issues of society — those big, meaty ideas about work and the future — are relegated to men. SIGH.

Usually crap but occasionally interesting.

The Starr Report