# The Relentless Angst > An epistolary blog. Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. Use `/llms-full.txt` for consolidated page and post context. Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`). ## Pages _No public content available._ ## Posts - [The Only Person In Sussex](https://angst.blog/42.md) - In your most recent letter, you noted that It’s necessary to have a less antagonistic relationship with the body because hating it makes you wish to avoid spending time noticing it, which then calls for distraction. Entertainment rather than focus. Lately, I’ve been caught between the Scylla of “tr… - [tinker, tailor, soldier, spy, goblin, gnome, bugbear, dwarf](https://angst.blog/41.md) - “Though I am not the only person in Sussex who reads Milton, I mean to write down my impressions of Paradise Lost while I am about it” September 10, 1918 A Writer’s Diary, Virginia Woolf (ed. Leonard Woolf) Somehow I have come to ask myself, how can one be a dwarf in an office environment? How can… - [You, Thou, and I (Again)](https://angst.blog/40.md) - Sometimes, rarely, you stumble upon someone and realise — whether by the artefacts they leave in their wake, or by the impressions they nail to the board — that this person you’ve encountered is not only weird and agentic, but also unapologetically ambitious. You realise that they’re someone who se… - [I, I and again I](https://angst.blog/39.md) - “Life passes. The clouds change perpetually over our houses.” The Waves, Virginia Woolf I let the days become months and now we’re in restart territory. Looking back over the archives and wondering what fragments, what images from our past writings still resonate? I’m gonna take that excuse to go b… - [A Bunch of Bees](https://angst.blog/38.md) - after countless exasperated pleas for a simpler and nicer world where people don’t play games with each other, i realize i may have autistically failed to account for the fact that many people enjoy playing games — @hyperdiscogirl Here’s the thing about humans: most of the time, the things they’re… - [a mould fit for a steelman](https://angst.blog/37.md) - Once, getting off the train on a summer evening in Glasgow central station, my cousin, a GP, was there to meet me as planned but looking nervously around. “There’s a festival on, they’ve been drinking all day” she tells me. There’s a young man slumped up ahead, in the archway through which we must… - [Three Great Domains](https://angst.blog/36.md) - Today: a zeroth draft; a few parts; the beginning of a series. § 1. We Set Fire To Things “How many decisions of meaning do we actually make,” you ask, “in our lives?” It’s true; we’re watery bundles. Sinew, nerve, reflex, habit. Even when we play at being cautious and careful, as you say, It’s jus… - [spend your twenties flirting](https://angst.blog/35.md) - More opportunities to encounter a risk – more magpies on the move, you say. How many decisions of meaning do we actually make, in our lives? I mean, how many that transform the course of who we are or will become, rather than ones that simply stretch the daily experience of being ourselves slightly… - [Exciting, Not Threatening](https://angst.blog/34.md) - Canberra is infamous — among its inhabitants — for the aggression of its magpies. We track ‘attacks’ and ‘warnings’ on a website. We trade grim stories, share desperate tips. In swooping season, cyclists change their commuting habits to avoid the ‘dangerous’ ‘hot spots’, and runners — acting out of… - [love is natural and real](https://angst.blog/33.md) - I was at a party a few weeks ago. A friend of mine went up to a stranger and said: ‘[our mutual friend] said we were going to love each other! Why are we going to love each other?’. That stranger and his girlfriend spent the rest of the party in the kitchen, door closed, breaking up. Being single m… - [Crude Little Wooden Idols](https://angst.blog/32.md) - I buried my grandfather a few hours ago. Cracks will spiderweb across the surface of the altar while I’m asleep, I’m sure. There’s gonna be a party when the wolf comes home. For now, though, this is context (not eulogy). I’m totally in the full heat of this one, so I haven’t bothered to tune. I’ll… - [the rabbit hole](https://angst.blog/31.md) - The world is swirling with coincidences and the faces of famous people. Bill Nighy is my only real life celebrity sighting and I can tell you he does the same gesture with his hands in real life as he does when he’s talking sweet nothings about art. Another coincidence, or an idea in the ether. I p… - [Things Become Grey](https://angst.blog/30.md) - (Warning: this one is a rabbit hole, so, please.) While I (usually) (try to) keep my work out of these letters, today I’m not sure I can. You write of Eric Hoel’s theory that “dreams are a tool of the mind to avoid overfitting, in the terminology of machine learning”. Clean analogies between neural… - [a totally amazing mind](https://angst.blog/29.md) - To retrace a few steps. Starting with your comment: I’m saying that we should both be curious and precise about everyone’s incuriosity and compulsive vagueness. I think a lot of our anti-agentic behaviour can be simply modelled as over- stimulation. Curiously this is combined with boredom in ways I… - [If Boats Could Float On Shadow](https://angst.blog/28.md) - It’s funny. My vague memory of that Helen Garner essay you mentioned from True Stories — ‘Three Acres, More Or Less’ — seemed so different from yours. Or, at least, my memory seemed so different from my model of what your memory of it was, based on what you wrote in your last letter. It bothered me… - [another day](https://angst.blog/27.md) - I woke up this morning thinking about my unwritten reply and an interaction Helen Garner wrote about in one of her lesser read collections of essays. It involved a property outside of Melbourne that she bought, a slice of land only a few acres in total, which she had begun to stay overnight at ever… - [P/NP/PC/NPC](https://angst.blog/26.md) - When I asked you to articulate what you thought you’d lost, you said, as a first pass: the potential to be a roving band of adventurers, the intimidating and sexily toughened skin we might have developed if we’d been able to hack coming to understand what it was we ourselves actually wanted, the mo… - [the game is called vulnerability](https://angst.blog/25.md) - It was lazy of me to say ‘we lost something’ and tail off into an easy finish. You’re right to ask what we lost. My first instinct is to say it was: the potential to be a roving band of adventurers, the intimidating and sexily toughened skin we might have developed if we’d been able to hack coming… - [Adopting an XP-gan Diet](https://angst.blog/24.md) - A while ago, a friend of mine (jokingly) pitched me on a new fad diet: XP-ganism. As all good D&D players know, agents in the world—in this case, animals—can be ranked by the amount of XP you’d be awarded for defeating them. Killing a lion or a brown bear would net you 200XP, whereas a boar would o… - [into the breach](https://angst.blog/23.md) - Let’s talk about Matt Yglesias. Matt Yglesias likes being talked about - I’m pretty sure it’s positive for him to be talked about in public even when you’re saying mean things (not even just professionally, I think emotionally - he says as much in the latest Washington Post profile), so I don’t nee… - [Dungeons & Dragons is a Laboratory for Human Agency](https://angst.blog/22.md) - I was leaning back in my chair, nursing my non-alcoholic beer, trying to work out which nearby conversation to join—and whether serving myself sneaky seconds of the vegetable pasta was socially acceptable at this particular dinner party—when I heard her say it: “Oh, you know, actually, I totally kn… - [you](https://angst.blog/21.md) - An author of narrative fiction (I’m aware this is a horribly broad brush I’m drawing with) is faced with the decision of how to manage the reader’s expectations towards the heady pull of the plot. As in, at a first approach, the reader wants some kind of build and release - but if that’s all you ge… - [Motive Forces](https://angst.blog/20.md) - As you know, the degree to which you are divided is the degree to which you are conquered. And, as you know, also Your subconscious drives are reorganizing your mind to try new strategies til one works, and since they aren’t conscious, they aren’t nearly as constrained by: * what you’ve adopted as… - [insider knowledge](https://angst.blog/19.md) - I love the genre of advice that frames everything as coming from parent to child, senior to junior. I love it because it assumes that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, knowledge that was hard-earned (if indeed you did earn it and aren’t just cadging it from a TED talk somewhere) can be pas… - [You're Never Gonna Be Anything Those People Respect](https://angst.blog/18.md) - inside you are two wolves. this is below the minimum viable population threshold, so they soon die out. the deer population inside you explodes, quickly stripping you of your internal vegetation, erosion increases, streams and rivers silt up, and insect numbers collapse due to ha—@wife_geist i can… - [planning to try](https://angst.blog/17.md) - Getting comfortable with failure - and the particular way I have been socialised to do it - has itself been the greater failure of my own life. Do you remember that night we were out in the forest, four of us, and the rain was bucketing down and we’d retreated to the warmest corner of our wooden hu… - [Cultivation of One's Garden](https://angst.blog/16.md) - I am terrible—truly terrible—at caring for the herbs and vegetables in my balcony garden. It’s a simple enough task, I know: there’s no nuclear winter right now, and it’s summer here around -35.2,149.1 ; really, all I have to do is add a little water daily to a dozen pots and beds. And yet, somehow… - [a naïve animal](https://angst.blog/15.md) - In the scientific world, a naïve animal is simply one that is yet to be exposed to an experiment. There is, I think, a place to stand that is not innocence as in foolishness, but neither a retreat to cynicism or weariness. Naïvety as unfamiliarity with the path out of the forest. Yet to be tested.… - [Freedom of the Void](https://angst.blog/14.md) - You talk about the break-out space of the bureaucratic office, a discussion in hushed voices, and you connect the tacit demand for body-lessness from such an environment to a subterranean demand for (a kind of) mind-lessness. The connection between the two demands exists because, as you quite right… - [the suppository of bureaucracy](https://angst.blog/13.md) - Last week I sat in the office with my ‘colleagues’ (comrades having fallen out of fashion of late), eating our reheated packed lunches and talking about whether it was preferable, assuming the medical benefit to be equal, to take a fecal microbiome transfer via the mouth or suppository. The group s… - [A Fantasy of Bureaucracy-in-Absence](https://angst.blog/12.md) - The critic Edward Mendelson once observed that Virtually every event in Gravity’s Rainbow is involved in a political process: specifically, the transformation of charismatic energy into the controlled and rationalized routine of a bureaucracy. These terms are of course borrowed from Max Weber, to w… - [shirtless and sweaty](https://angst.blog/11.md) - Have you watched SAS: Rogue Heroes? It’s a recent BBC release, and I spent much of the last week watching it. Perhaps they went with SAS because it didn’t require the budget to film a bunch of men in the desert as it would have to do the Battle of Britain again (the BBC at 100 years is in some ways… - [As Precursor, Not Parallel](https://angst.blog/10.md) - Today, two stories. The first is impersonal, and is about the difficulty of handling immediacy and specificity in the context of State violence. The second is personal, and is about the difficulty of handling abstraction and generality in the context of personal agency. Two angles on the same cultu… - [grief for him touches you](https://angst.blog/9.md) - People, through some theatrical spectacle, some embodiment of the dramatic, become motivated to kill people who are otherwise total strangers. This, if I understand what you’re suggesting, is parallel to what is going on when the Good is taken to be the Good of Society rather than the individual. I… - [Fractal Conflict, Spectacle Violence](https://angst.blog/8.md) - You write that If this culturally contingent tendency of comrades to grasp for totalising power is, as you put it ‘downstream of a worldview in which ‘the group comes first’ because, on some level, ‘The Group’ is the moral patient’ — then I would like to know where this comes from, because I don’t… - [a sharing of life's glories](https://angst.blog/7.md) - I am neither traffic nor in traffic. This is the greatest joy of travel by bike. I am amongst, but not frustrated (in either sense) by the presence of other people. At risk of stretching the analogy too far, that’s not a bad working model for how I’d like to travel through the world. To go back to… - [By Totalising Power](https://angst.blog/6.md) - Imagine that you’re walking down a street in a big, Western city. Let’s say central London. It’s late at night, but the pedestrian traffic is still pretty thick. It’s a Friday evening, let’s say, and the pubs around you are disgorging their noisesome and well-lubricated masses. You’re tired. You’re… - [In Certain Circles](https://angst.blog/5.md) - A few weeks ago I found myself sitting in a local park, amongst a mixed-age, somewhat scruffy group of locals, at an Extinction Rebellion-organised ‘community assembly’. At some point, sitting in breakout groups, we were tasked with coming up with actions which we could approach the local council w… - [Stilts, Supports, Subagents, Shims](https://angst.blog/4.md) - Talk of ‘subagents’ is getting pretty popular in certain circles. Given your delightful use of ‘stilts’—which I take to be a pretty elegant metaphor for the way that an oft-used frame of ‘friends as supports’ really works from the inside—I think it might be valuable for us to untangle some of the o… - [the problem of minds](https://angst.blog/3.md) - I sometimes imagine each of us as standing upon stilts. When I look down, I have more than two stilts below me, though each still has a single leg going down to it - I guess I have more than two legs now, although my imagination is too lackluster to sharpen the focus around the midriff area to make… - [A Futile Form of Irony](https://angst.blog/2.md) - There’s an ancient thread of tweets from @fucktheory, peace be upon him. Firsthand record of the thread is gone, and the account suspended, so you’ll have to believe me when I say that it went approximately as follows: For at least twenty years, upper-middle class, often tenured academics have been… - [FILDI](https://angst.blog/1.md) - It’s a start. ## Optional - [RSS Feed](https://angst.blog/rss/) - [Sitemap](https://angst.blog/sitemap.xml) - [Full content of pages and posts](https://angst.blog/llms-full.txt)