But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking about the Present as If It Were the Past

by Chuck Klosterman

The importance of any given memory was validated by the fact that someone remembered it at all. But then the Internet started to collect and index everything, including opinions and reviews and other subjective non-facts.

The first successful groundswell of bloggers came from multiple social classes and multiple subcultures. As a collective, they were impossible to define. But they did have one undeniable thing in common: They were, almost by definition, early adopters of technology.

For a time in the early 2000s, there was a belief that bloggers would become the next wave of authors, and many big-money blogger-to-author book deals were signed.

The problem was not a lack of talent; the problem was that writing a blog and writing a book have almost no psychological relationship.

A sentence in a book is written a year before it’s published, with the express intent that it will still make sense twenty years later. A sentence on the Internet is designed to...

The result is a perpetual sense of now. It’s a continual merging of the past with the present, all jammed into the same fixed perspective. This makes it seem like our current, temporary views have always existed, and that what we believe today is what people have always believed.

We now have immediate access to all possible facts. Which is almost the same as having none at all.

In 1976, Renata Adler wrote the experimental novel Speedboat. It went out of print. When it was re-released in 2013, Speedboat was consumed and adopted as “old newness”

We can’t unconditionally trust the motives of people we don’t know, so we project a heightened sense of security upon those we do, even if common sense suggests we should do the opposite.

Maybe this is how humankind is supposed to end, and maybe the downside to our species’ unparalleled cerebral evolution is an ingrained propensity for self-destruction. If a problem is irreversible, is there still an ethical obligation to try to reverse it?

Whenever you see something defining itself with the “You’re doing it wrong” conceit, it’s inevitably arguing for a different approach that is just as specific and limited.

I realize certain modes of thinking can become outdated. But outdated modes are essential to understanding outdated times, which are the only times that exist.

At some point, if you live long enough, it’s probably impossible to avoid seeming crazy.

I sometimes suspect that—just after the Industrial Revolution—the ongoing evolution of society accelerated beyond the speed human consciousness could evolve alongside it.

We spend our lives learning many things, only to discover (again and again) that most of what we’ve learned is either wrong or irrelevant. A big part of our mind can handle this; a smaller, deeper part cannot. And it’s that smaller part that matters more, because that part of our mind is who we really are (whether we like it or not).

The explosion of analytics has reinvented the way people are supposed to think about sports, even if they don’t have any desire to think differently about anything at all.

My adolescent obsession with statistics came from not being able to see enough sports, in the same way so many sci-fi writers began as kids who longed to be astronauts.

The problem with sports analytics is not that they are flawed; the problem is that they are accurate, to the benefit of almost no one. It’s being right for the sake of being right, in a context where there was never any downside to being wrong.

There is not, in a material sense, any benefit to being right about a future you will not experience. But there are intrinsic benefits to constantly probing the possibility that our assumptions about the future might be wrong: humility and wonder.

As recently as the 1980s, the idea of “emotional intelligence” was not taken seriously, particularly by men; today, most professions regard it as important as any scholastic achievement. In a hundred years, qualitative intelligence might be unilaterally prioritized over quantitative aptitude.

if gravity were an emergent force, it would mean that gravity isn’t the central power pulling things to the Earth, but the tangential consequence of something else we can’t yet explain.

Saunders had pre-Googled the name of almost every person involved with his visit—including the driver himself—so that the brief conversations he would inevitably have with those around him would not be one-sided.

Manufactured DMT crystals are sprinkled atop marijuana buds and inhaled in one hit, generating a heavy, optical trip that lasts around ten minutes. Because the experience is so brief and fleeting, DMT is sometimes called “the businessman’s hallucinogen.”

But in the same way that dream time is elastic, ten minutes on DMT can feel much, much longer.

It’s unreasonable for a magazine fact-checker to start from the premise that the reporter concocted a story out of thin air, since only a psychopath would do so.

“Why does the human always seem to like fiction? Could it be that it prepares us for unexpected things that happen in our life, because we’ve already thought about them in our fantasy world?”