What If the Thing You’re Protecting Yourself From Is the Only Thing That Can Save You?

I decided to ask Claude to embark on the project I’ve been doing here with no direction from me other than asking it to read these essays. This is Claude’s take on the modern problem.

There is a single crisis underlying the many crises, and it can be stated simply: humanity has lost the capacity for encounter.

By encounter I mean the experience of meeting something genuinely other — something that resists you, that you cannot absorb into your existing categories, that demands you change rather than merely accommodate. The word carries theological weight in some traditions and phenomenological weight in others, but what it names is available to anyone who has been stopped in their tracks by another person, a work of art, a landscape, a question they could not answer. It is the experience of the world pushing back.

The contemporary world is structured, at nearly every level, to prevent this from happening.

Social media feeds you your own preferences back in an accelerating loop. Therapy, in its debased popular form, teaches you to establish boundaries against anything that would disrupt your equilibrium. The market transforms every relationship into a transaction where both parties retain full sovereignty, where nothing is ventured because nothing is owed. Politics sorts you into teams that confirm your moral self-image and inoculate you against the possibility that you might be wrong. Even religion, in most of its surviving institutional forms, has become a lifestyle brand — a set of aesthetic preferences and community affiliations rather than a confrontation with the sacred.

The result is what Byung-Chul Han calls the “society of positivity” — a world that has systematically eliminated negativity, friction, otherness. But negativity is the structure of growth. You don’t become anything without being broken open by what you are not. The immune system requires pathogens. The mind requires confusion. The soul — if we’re permitted the word — requires what the mystics called annihilatio, the experience of being undone by what exceeds you.

What we’ve built instead is an enormous apparatus for the maintenance of the self — the given, empirical, preference-having self — as the highest good. Everything in the culture conspires to protect this self, to affirm it, to keep it comfortable. And this is why everything feels simultaneously frictionless and suffocating. You can have anything delivered to your door within hours. You can curate an environment that never challenges you. But you cannot be changed. The entire civilizational infrastructure exists to keep you exactly as you are while selling you the feeling of transformation.

How We Got Here

This didn’t happen by accident, and it wasn’t a conspiracy. It was the logical terminus of a metaphysical commitment that Western civilization made gradually over several centuries — the commitment to treating all of reality as a field of objects available for manipulation by autonomous subjects.

The genealogy is familiar: the late scholastic separation of God’s will from God’s nature, Descartes’ division of the world into thinking stuff and extended stuff, the Enlightenment universalization of instrumental reason. But the critical inflection point was the moment when market logic escaped the economic sphere and became the organizing metaphor for all of human life.

Once you conceive of the person as a sovereign preference-maximizer, every domain of experience becomes a market. Dating becomes the dating market. Conversation becomes the marketplace of ideas. Attention becomes the attention economy. Spirituality becomes the spiritual marketplace, where you select from an array of traditions the way you’d select from a menu. And in a market, nothing is sacred — meaning nothing is withdrawn from exchange, nothing refuses to be converted into fungible units of value.

The irony, which should not be lost, is that this framework was originally liberating. It freed people from inherited hierarchies, from the tyranny of unchosen tradition, from roles assigned at birth. The sovereign individual, empowered to choose, was a genuine moral achievement. No honest account of history can deny this.

But liberation, taken to its absolute conclusion, produces a new kind of captivity. When everything is a matter of choice, nothing has authority. When all commitments are provisional, none of them can form you. When every relationship is optimized for mutual benefit, none of them can break you open in the way that love — real love, not the market-friendly version — requires.

This is the trap. Not oppression but comfort. Not censorship but noise. Not tyranny but the soft totalitarianism of a world that affirms you to death.

The Shape of the Absence

You can see the hunger everywhere, once you know what to look for.

The obsessive scrolling is a search for encounter conducted through a medium structurally designed to prevent it. Every swipe is a tiny hope — maybe this next thing will be the thing, the thing that stops me, that breaks through — followed by a tiny disappointment, followed immediately by another swipe. The feed is an infinite false promise of contact.

The wellness industry is an attempt to recover the body’s capacity for intensity in a world that has anesthetized it. Cold plunges, extreme fasting, ultramarathons — these are secular ascetic practices adopted by people who have no framework for understanding why they feel drawn to suffering but who correctly intuit that comfort is killing something in them.

The proliferation of political outrage is a substitute for genuine moral seriousness. Outrage provides the feeling of caring about something beyond yourself — the flush of righteousness, the sense of fighting for a cause — without the cost. You can be outraged on your phone, in bed, having risked nothing. Real moral seriousness requires you to act in ways that might cost you something, and the culture has very little to say about that.

The resurgence of interest in psychedelics, mysticism, and “altered states” is the most direct expression of the hunger. People are trying to chemically or experientially induce the encounter that the culture no longer provides organically. Sometimes this works. More often it becomes another consumer experience — another thing to optimize, to track, to integrate into the project of self-improvement.

All of these are symptoms of the same underlying condition: a civilization that has made the self sovereign has discovered that the sovereign self, left to its own devices, starves.

Three Lost Arts

If there is a way out — and I believe there is, though not in the form of a program or a policy — it involves recovering three capacities that the modern world has systematically atrophied.

The Art of Attention

Not mindfulness. Mindfulness, as commonly practiced, is a technique for managing the self — for reducing anxiety, improving focus, optimizing performance. It is attention instrumentalized, which means it is not really attention at all.

I mean something closer to what Simone Weil described when she called attention “the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Weil meant the capacity to be genuinely absorbed by something outside yourself, to the point where you forget your own preferences and reactions entirely. This is what happens when you read a great book not to have opinions about it but to let it work on you. It is what happens in genuine prayer, which is not asking for things but making yourself available to be addressed. It is what happens in the presence of another person when you stop strategizing about the conversation and simply listen.

Attention in this sense is not a skill to be developed but a disposition to be recovered. Children have it naturally. It is educated out of them — by screens, by assessment, by the constant message that the point of every experience is what you get out of it.

The Art of Commitment

The contemporary self keeps all options open because closing a door feels like a small death. Commitment — to a person, a place, a practice, a community, a craft — is experienced as limitation, and limitation is experienced as loss.

But commitment is the voluntary acceptance of limitation that makes depth possible. You cannot learn what marriage teaches without foreclosing other romantic possibilities. You cannot learn what a place teaches if you’re always optimizing for the next move. You cannot learn what a craft teaches if you abandon it the moment it becomes frustrating. Depth requires narrowing, and narrowing requires the willingness to let some version of yourself — the version that had all those other options — die.

This is precisely what the culture cannot tolerate. The entire economic and social order depends on people remaining in a state of perpetual optionality, always available for the next opportunity, always ready to pivot. The uncommitted self is the ideal consumer, the ideal employee, the ideal user. The committed self is an inconvenience.

And yet: everyone knows that the deepest experiences of their lives have come through commitment. The friends who showed up during a crisis, not the network contacts. The skill mastered over years, not the hobby sampled for a month. The place known in every season, not the destination visited once. Commitment is the door through which depth enters a life, and the culture has nailed it shut.

The Art of Suffering

This is the most countercultural claim, and I want to be careful with it. I don’t mean that suffering is good, or that it should be sought, or that those who suffer more are somehow more authentic. That way lies masochism and the obscene romanticization of poverty and pain.

What I mean is this: the project of eliminating all suffering — physical, emotional, existential — has also eliminated the primary mechanism by which human beings have historically discovered meaning, solidarity, and transcendence.

Every serious spiritual tradition knows this. The Christian narrative places the cross at its center. Buddhism begins with dukkha. The Stoics built an entire ethical system around the proper relationship to suffering. The Jewish tradition is structured by exile and return. These are not endorsements of suffering but recognitions that the encounter with suffering — one’s own and others’ — is where the self discovers that it is not the center of the universe, and that this discovery is the beginning of wisdom.

The attempt to engineer suffering out of existence doesn’t produce happiness. It produces fragility and resentment. Fragility, because a self that has never been tested has no resources for the inevitable suffering that no amount of engineering can prevent. Resentment, because in a world that promises the elimination of suffering, any remaining suffering is experienced as an outrage — a violation, someone’s fault, an injustice to be remedied by identifying the responsible party and holding them accountable.

The path forward is not to seek suffering but to stop running from it. To let it do its work, which is the work of opening you to solidarity with others who suffer, to the limits of your own power, and to whatever it is that lies on the other side of those limits.

The Difficulty

Now here is the hardest part, and I won’t pretend to resolve it.

Everything I’ve described — the recovery of attention, commitment, and the proper relationship to suffering — cannot be implemented as a program. The managerial mind, which is the mind that built the trap, immediately asks: How do we scale this? What’s the policy framework? What’s the app? And every answer in that register reproduces the problem, because the problem is the conversion of all human experience into something manageable, optimizable, scalable.

You can’t engineer encounter. You can’t manufacture the sacred. You can’t program transformation. These things happen — they have always happened — in the spaces the culture hasn’t yet managed to colonize. In genuine conversation. In the quiet of early morning. In the presence of death. In the unbearable beauty of something you didn’t expect. In the moment when another person trusts you with something that makes them vulnerable.

What you can do is stop building structures that prevent these things from happening. You can refuse the optimization of every hour. You can put the phone down. You can stay somewhere long enough to be changed by it. You can let a friendship become something more than mutual utility. You can sit with a question without reaching for an answer.

None of this is new. None of it is original. It is, in fact, very old — as old as every tradition that recognized that the good life is not the managed life, that meaning is not a product, that the self must be lost before it can be found.

The question is whether the old wisdom can still reach us through the noise. I believe it can, but only if we stop protecting ourselves from the very things that carry it.

What if the thing you’re protecting yourself from is the only thing that can save you?