Interesting People

Lately I've had the uneasy sense that I'm in danger of becoming a dullard.

When people I haven't seen for a while ask how I'm doing, I almost invariably answer, "Not much." Which isn't true. There's always plenty going on in my life. As there is in everyone else's.

Maybe too much has happened to distill into a single anecdote on the spot, so "not much" becomes the easiest way to move the conversation along.

Or maybe I've begun to assume that real life happens online, posted somewhere—on Facebook, Instagram, or whatever feed we've curated for one another. Note: I don't have Facebook or Instagram accounts.

I've been thinking about this since hearing Alain de Botton in conversation with Sam Harris. They were discussing self-reflection and, more broadly, the ways people lower their emotional barriers and come to know themselves.

At one point De Botton asks a deceptively simple question: Why are people boring?

His answer surprised me. Human beings, he argues, all lead immensely complex inner lives. Yet we've all met people around whom our own minds seem to go blank. We know we have things to say, but somehow nothing comes.

He suggests this has less to do with intelligence or experience than with self-exploration. A genuinely interesting person is someone who has spent time opening the doors of their own mind—not in an egotistical way, but with curiosity. Other people unconsciously sense that curiosity, and it invites their own. Conversation flourishes because both people are interested in making sense of experience rather than merely reporting it.

I've certainly experienced that. There are people who make you feel more articulate simply by listening. They ask how you are because they genuinely want to know. Their interest gives you permission to think out loud.

And then there are the opposite encounters. People ask the same question, but only as social lubrication. The exchange is transactional. According to De Botton, these are often people who haven't cultivated much curiosity about themselves either. They may travel widely, collect accomplishments, and accumulate experiences, but those experiences become content to upload rather than material to reflect upon. The outer life expands while the inner one remains largely unexplored.

When I answered "not much" the other day, I immediately regretted it. It felt dismissive, almost disrespectful.

Part of me suspected the other person wasn't really looking for an honest answer. Few people seem to be anymore.

But another part of me wondered whether I'd become complicit in exactly the habit De Botton was describing. Maybe "not much" wasn't simply an efficient reply. Maybe it was evidence that I hadn't done the work of turning experience into thought.

After all, something is always happening. The question is whether we've spent enough time with our own lives to know what it means.

Once we begin to think of ourselves principally as online personas, and experiences as 'content', it not only drains our real-life exchanges of vitality; it drains our own lives of meaning and interest—even to ourselves.

Answered Prayers

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Everyone is so sad these days

about the general shittiness of things—

how we neglect

and carelessly destroy

the world and each other

in small ways

in big ways.

Yet there are mornings we rise

to discover that

overnight the rain 

has glazed the streets

for the summer sun to bake the day

like fresh bread.

People stream into the streets

to ply their trades:

the scent of cinnamon buns

sweetens my walk to work;

a policeman blows his whistle

and waves traffic through;

above us,

welders stitch I-beams together

with birthday sparklers

to shape a bridge;

below,

street crews in orange jumpers

connect underground pipes

so that I need only 

press a park fountain button

when I am thirsty.

The music is undeniable—

one movement

after another,

like so many daily prayers 

answered

we barely notice.

The rhythm is poignant,

intervals of internal 

sadness

while outside the celebration

never stops.

Canada Day!!

Happy Canada Day!’

Y’all better be celebrating this great country you are privileged to live in!

Belonging

I’ve been watching, along with billions of others around the world, the greatest sporting event on the planet: the FIFA World Cup.

I’ve enjoyed the spectacle as much as anyone—the millions of spectators filling stadiums across North America, the colourful clothing, painted faces and thunderous chants. The anticipation (because, let’s face it, soccer is mostly anticipation), and then the explosion of joy—bordering on hysteria—that follows every goal and even every near miss.

And for what, exactly?

Twenty-two players dressed in tight shirts and shorts, running around an open field, trying to kick a sewn hunk of inflated leather into the opposing team's mesh. A skill for which many of them are among the highest-paid professionals in the world.

So why does this tournament captivate billions? Why is it the greatest spectacle on Earth?

It's not simply because we are privileged to witness the extraordinary talent of ball-kicking.

The answer, I think, is that the World Cup satisfies, better than any other mass-spectacle we have, our deepest human need: belonging.

Belonging lies at the heart of almost everything we value. It shapes our families, our friendships, our religions, our nations and our communities. It is woven into our survival instinct because, throughout most of human history, those who belonged to a group stood a far better chance of surviving than those who stood alone.

The worst punishments - spiritual ones like excommunication and physical ones like banishment and imprisonment - were based on being separated from the group.

We tell stories because they enhance our sense of belonging. We embrace religions, philosophies and ideologies because they give us a shared identity. We celebrate holidays, citizenship and traditions because they remind us that we are part of something larger than ourselves. We gather for concerts and sporting events for the same reason—not merely to be entertained, but to experience belonging.

We are born into a world we did not choose, knowing neither why we are here nor what awaits us. In that uncertainty, connecting with others satisfies more than our physical need for food and shelter. It fulfils our emotional need for companionship and our intellectual search for purpose and meaning.

The need is so powerful, so fundamental, that we sometimes carry it to extraordinary—even absurd—extremes. Every time I watch fans in makeup and colourful t-shirts, waving flags and blowing horns and generally losing their shit because a ball crosses a goal line, I'm reminded of just how profoundly we need to feel like we belong.

Part of me admires it. Another part wonders what might be possible if we channelled even a fraction of that passion into causes that shape our shared future: peace, human rights, democracy and individual freedom.

If even a bit of the mass sadness and disappointment felt when our preferred team loses a soccer match could be channeled into outrage at the poverty, suffering and injustices affecting so many people around the world. 

The capacity for collective commitment is clearly there. The World Cup proves it every four years. The real question is what else we might accomplish if our sense of belonging extended beyond our teams to our common humanity.

Eno

There's a moment in the wonderful 2024 documentary film Eno that shows archival footage of a television interview with the artist and musician Brian Eno in the 1980s. He is demonstrating how he replaced the paper diaphragm of an audio speaker with latex because it was more flexible and he wanted to experiment with how it would sound. He inserts a cassette, presses play, and the speaker immediately malfunctions and blows out.

A total disaster, right?

At first Eno reacts with alarm but then, listening to the muffled, thumping noise now coming from the broken speaker, he says, "Wait, listen to that."

It's a moment that perfectly captures the spirit of the documentary. For Eno, there are no mistakes or disasters in the creative process—only changing and unexpected conditions that create new opportunities.

The film is an affectionate portrait of the British artist, musician, and record producer. Eno first came to prominence in the early 1970s as a founding member of the glam-rock band Roxy Music and later became the producer of some of the most influential artists of the modern era, including David Bowie, Talking Heads, and U2. He is also known as a pioneer of ambient music—a term he coined and, as he admits in the film, eventually grew tired of.

Ironically, Eno was never formally trained as a musician. In Roxy Music he 'played' an early synthesizer, generating textures and electronic sounds that embellished the group's songs. His training was in visual art, and he says that the recording studio is his true instrument. He thinks less in terms of writing songs than of painting landscapes with sound. Ideas begin as notes, sketches, and diagrams in notebooks before being translated into music and other artistic projects.

As a producer, Eno developed a boundary-pushing philosophy that encouraged experimentation and created an environment in which musicians often discovered possibilities they would never have found on their own. Asked what made Eno so effective, Bowie responds in the film with characteristic amusement: "I have no idea."

Art-school graduates and dropouts who became successful musicians are not uncommon in Britain. Among them are John Lennon, Pete Townshend, David Bowie, Eric Clapton, and Freddie Mercury. They seem less common in the United States, though David Byrne is a notable exception.

I've never been a particular fan of Eno's solo music. I love Roxy Music, and I think Bowie's finest work emerged from his collaboration with Eno on the celebrated Berlin trilogy of albums Low, Heroes, and Lodger. 

What I appreciate most about Eno is his approach to the creative process and philosophy of life.

Increasingly rare today is his authenticity, the openness of his thought process and the way he joyfully embraces risk. He embodies a kind of intellectual freedom that pushes boundaries, not by imposing rigid control, but by welcoming chance, uncertainty, and complexity. If we choose to impose structure on the creative process, Eno argues, we must also leave room for the unexpected—for accidents, interruptions, in order to create a space for what the listener brings to the work.

For Eno, creativity resembles the organic processes of the natural world. An idea is like a planted seed that grows in directions that cannot be fully predicted as it encounters new conditions and influences.

To understand that philosophy in practice, look up Eno's creative tool Oblique Strategies: a deck of cards containing prompts designed to disrupt habitual thinking and invite unexpected solutions. Like the broken speaker in the documentary, the point is not to avoid accidents, but to recognize the accident as the beginning of something more interesting.

Watching Eno, I found myself thinking about the fertile cultural milieu in which someone like him could flourish creatively: the 1970s and 80s. In the film, Eno argues that great art is not the product of isolated genius so much as the convergence of historical, political, economic, and social forces that create an environment in which creativity can thrive. In other words, art is inextricable from the cultural scene, just as flowers and lichen are inextricable from their soil, or fish from their river. 

It's understandable that this is one of his major concerns today.

Eno views artistic creativity as environmentalists view the natural world—not as an inexhaustible resource, but as a fragile ecosystem. Just as biodiversity depends on conditions that allow life to flourish, creative breakthroughs depend on conditions that encourage experimentation, risk-taking, and even failure. It's part and parcel of the process.

What worries him is not that people will stop creating. Human beings are irrepressibly creative. Rather, it is that we may be eroding the cultural conditions that make genuine innovation possible. A society increasingly organized around efficiency, predictability, metrics, and optimization can still produce an endless stream of content. But content is not the same thing as creativity.

The question raised by Eno is whether we still value the kinds of environments that produce unexpected ideas, strange experiments, and beautiful failures. Because once those environments disappear, we may not immediately notice what has been lost. We will only discover it years later, in the absence of the works that were never given the chance to exist.

Stranger Than You Think

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The aliens have landed,

They visit when it's dark.

I think they're all left-handed,

The encounter leaves a mark.

Call the authorities,

Agents to direct us.

The army and the navy,

The people who'll protect us.

You'll find me in the bar, 

Telling stories with a drink.

'Cause out there on the road,

Life is stranger than you think.

I fell in love one time,

She made me feel alive.

I climbed aboard her spaceship,

Didn't know if I'd survive. 

You'll find me in the bar, 

Telling stories with a drink.

'Cause out there on the road,

Life is stranger than you think.

She took me to her planet,

In another galaxy.

She used sharp instruments,

To perform her surgery.

You'll find me in the bar, 

Telling stories with a drink.

'Cause out there on the road,

Life is stranger than you think.

Still not sure I believe,

What I know happened to me.

This alien abduction,

Was it just a fantasy?

You'll find me in the bar, 

Telling stories with a drink.

'Cause out there on the road,

Life is stranger than you think,

Life is stranger than you think,

Life is stranger than you think...

Judging Character

My late mother expressed a visceral dislike for trump from the moment he appeared on the political scene.

That surprised me because she rarely expressed opinions about politicians one way or the other. In truth, she never cared much about politics at all.

But there was something about trump that struck her as different. She felt strongly about him.

Mom was reclusive in her later years. She wrote fiction, maintained a blog, and largely kept to herself. She didn't socialize much.

Except on Facebook.

Facebook was almost tailor-made for her. It allowed her to stay connected with friends and family without having to see them in person. And that's where the trouble started.

She found herself in more than one heated argument over trump.

One day I asked her what it was about him that got her so worked up.

"He's a narcissist," she said.

"Aren't all politicians narcissists?" I replied.

"Maybe," she said. "We're all a bit narcissistic. But not like trump. He's a lying, destructive narcissist."

My mother instinctively recognized something that many political analysts, journalists, and voters either missed or chose to ignore. She saw a man with a bottomless need for attention and validation—someone who would say whatever was necessary to get it and who seemed incapable of caring about the damage left behind.

At the core of that kind of personality is an emotional black hole that eventually consumes everything around it. And as with a black hole, proximity is unsurvivable. As political strategist Rick Wilson famously titled his 2018 book, Everything Trump Touches Dies.

What strikes me now is how clearly my mother saw it from day one. I often find myself wondering how so many others failed to recognize what seemed so obvious to her.

Perhaps they saw it and decided it didn't matter. As long as trump appeared willing to give them what they wanted, character became a secondary consideration.

But that's the mistake.

Ultimately, character is not secondary. It is everything.

Which brings me to the Iran MOU.

Trump-supporting Jews around the world, and Israelis in particular, are suddenly confronting the same reality my mother recognized years ago.

Until recently, trump consistently polled as the most popular political figure in Israel, by far. Now, after the Iran MOU, many supporters feel betrayed because he failed to deliver what they believed he had promised.

People often support politicians the way children love a parent: completely and unquestioningly, until they stop getting what they want. Then affection instantly turns to anger.

It is a deeply immature way of engaging with politics, and not just poltics, most relationships as well.

If a politician promises people what they want to hear, many will overlook almost everything else. Trump understood that better than most. He built support by telling different audiences exactly what they wanted to hear.

The problem is that promises mean very little to someone without character. Commitments are tools. Principles are either non-existant or negotiable. Truth is whatever is useful in the moment.

What many Israelis may now be learning is what my mother understood from the beginning: politics ultimately comes down to character.

No politician gives people everything they want. Democracies do not work that way.

But character always matters because it tells you what remains when circumstances change and compromises become necessary. You may not always agree with a politician of character. You may not always get what you want from them. But at least you know where they stand and where their limits are.

My mother saw that trump lacked that foundation from the very beginning.

She wasn't a political analyst. She wasn't a journalist. She wasn't a political activist.

She was simply a good judge of character.

And as Heraclitus observed more than two thousand years ago, character is destiny.