Notes

Many people have been posting about an essay by Terry Godier that articulates something he calls “phantom obligation”. I’ve read it twice and have been thinking about the concept much more than unexpected.

However, the way I’ve been thinking about it has more to do with how I feel a version of phantom obligation in relation to small household tasks, and within significant relationships with other people and institutions.

It’s nice to have phantom obligation as a signifier to think with, to name what I might be feeling after I feel it…

The rendering of the concept into words does not cure my tendency to experience phantom obligation, but it does help me retroactively interpret that experience in a way that has the affect of reducing the pressure of the imagined/assumed/felt sense of obligation.

I think this is a good thing.

It is the morning of the fourth of February. I woke up early today and made my kids waffles for breakfast, which is something I would not normally have the time to do. I sat with them and drank coffee from a white mug with the words “You’re doing great, Jeevan” printed on it.

This is a reference to a scene from the HBO adaptation of the Novel Station 11, by Emily St. John Mandel.

In the scene, the male character Jeevan is trying to help a woman who is actively in labor, trying to deliver a baby. As Jeevan trying to talk to women through what’s happening, he gets freaked out and the woman who is struggling to give birth says to him, “You’re doing great Jeevan.”

When I watch this with my wife, we thought it was hysterical. Then we started saying it to each other moments. Loke when I was trying to run on a tree mill and my wife would ask if I was going to the store later, I’d say, “You’re doing great Jeevan.”

I don’t know if the humor of this will make sense to anybody reading this… but we thought it was funny.

I actually got the mug made as a gift for my wife.

My oldest son read the words on the mug and asked me what they meant. I tried to explain it, but I don’t think I was able to explain it in a way that his seven-year-old mind really understood.

From a post on Michael Easter’s 2% Substack.

We all know we spend too much time on our phones. There are thousands of articles offering tips on how to use your phone less. But these often miss an important point. When people reduce their phone screen time, they often get bored—and immediately replace it with another screen, short-circuiting the very mental state that drives creativity. Taking a couple of hours off your phone screen time only to add in more TV time is like replacing cigarettes with chewing tobacco.

Yeah!

Easter’s larger point is that, rather than telling ourselves we need to look at our phones less, we should try to increase the time we spend not being stimulated by a screen.

“Instead of less phone, more boredom,” he said in a different podcast/interview.

It’s a simple and obvious observation. One that is so simple and so obvious that people (myself included) don’t think it.

I read this in a New Yorker profile of Tim Berners-Lee, the man who is credited with inventing the word wide web: [Tim’s mother] Mary, a believer in “watchful negligence,” would let him and his three younger siblings wrap themselves in extra perforated tape.

I now really like the term “watchful negligence”!

I also really like how the author of the profile put that term in quotation marks. A great small editorial choice.

P.S. This is a post from one of my old blogs that I’m moving over to From78.

From a New York Times article on the writing of the French writer

In exploring his own consciousness, he seems also to explore ours.

This is what I hope I’m doing a version of with From 78.

Hello Daystar,

I’ve been thinking about how I’d like to use the From78 site/blog. One possibility is to use it as a space to record different thoughts, feelings, moods, associations, vibes, hunches, and all the other stuff that makes up my headnoise at the start of a day.

Here are some loose suggestions (to myself) for how to make it happen.

• Don’t overthink it
• Keep it short
• Aim to do it daily, but if I miss a day, don’t worry about it

Today: It is the first day in more than a week that I have not woken up feeling sick. It is marvelous. Be that as it may, I don’t feel like I’ve returned to what I’d call “baseline.” While I don’t feel sick, I feel like I’ve been sick and am still recovering from having been sick.

I wanted to exercise, but I decided to hold off because I’m worried I’ll overdo it. What I want is to return to baseline, so I can start training and get more benefit from it than I will if I start before I’m ready… which would actually set me back.

I’m also looking at how many podcasts, RSS feeds, and newsletters I subscribe to, and honestly asking myself how many of them I actually read, rather than skim. Some things need to be cut.

Is Ganzeer.today

Today’s soundtrack is a combination of cafe chatter (played via my phone) and Persian jazz (played via my laptop).

I’ve never heard of anyone doing this kind of two devices to make a soundtrack to the day thing.

From  Inventing the Future, by Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams

If politics without passion leads to cold-hearted, bureaucratic technocracy, then passion bereft of analysis risks becoming a libidinally driven surrogate for effective action. Politics comes to be about feelings of personal empowerment, masking an absence of strategic gains.

Yeah.

Discovered via E-FLUX Review 220

Polybius: The Authoritarian Consolidation Index (John Ganz) — An interactive poli-sci app that uses Claude to evaluate recent news against theoretical models like Linz’s “Perils of Presidentialism”, Gramsci’s hegemony, and de Tocqueville’s civil society to compute a score that measures the health of a given democracy. The app is pre-loaded with the USA’s “authoritarian consolidation index” score, but with your own API keys, you can run the analysis on any country of interest.

Here is the score when I checked today (31st of January, 2026). If you click the link, you’ll get a lot more information.

It has been brutally cold for a week. Going outside, even for a short time, has been very uncomfortable. (The cold air literally hurts any exposed skin, and breathing the air makes the inside of my nose feel that kind of burn that ironically comes from contact with something very cold.)

This is what a typical day has looked like for the past week. (For context: the larger number at the top of each bar represents the temperature in Fahrenheit and the smaller number beneath it represents the temperature in Celsius.)

Today, I see the temp is going to get up to 25 degrees Fahrenheit / -4 degrees Celsius, and I’m thinking to myself, “Things are warming up!”

The idea that my body will experience these temperatures as warm is absurd. Yet, it is also true. Wow.

BeforeI had kids, I would get annoyed at how people with kids reacted to cold and flu season.

Simply put: I thought they were treating a time of year when many people had to deal with an inconvenient transitory illness like a bigger deal than it was.

Today, I’ve got four kids, the oldest is close to seven and the youngest not much over one year old. And everyone in the house has a cold.

Not COVID, RSV, strep, or the flu. Just a cold.

Having a cold makes everything even the most mundane task of daily life (sleeping, moving, talking, etc.) go from things that I don’t need to think about to things that require noticeable mental and physical effort.

When it was just me who had to endure this rottenness, it was uncomfortable, but it was definitely bearable. This is probably why I thought that people with kids were overreacting to cold flu season before I had kids. I was was assuming that my subjective experience of discomfort and difficulties that are part of being sick were representative of what they would be going through.

Now, as I experience having to deal with

1. my own sickness induced discomfort and
2. how my kid’s sickness induced discomfort (which makes them act in ways that are not fun)

I realize how sawfly cold and flu season is for people with kids! Having to manage the discomfort of others makes my discomfort become far more uncomfortable.

It also makes me more aware of something I talk about in my podcast —how getting older (and more experienced) has made me far less judgmental than when I was young (and less experienced).

Via Manton Reece (@manton)

Moltbook — a social network for AI agents to have discussions with one another. This is wild. I often joke about “our future AI overlords” but this might’ve just crossed a line into actual concern… We are putting a lot of trust into these new bots. 🦞

OMG!

My immediate first ass association is to the concept of “the jackpot” from the recent William Gibson novels.

For those who may not be familiar with the “jackpot” as a term/concept:

The Jackpot is a term coined by William Gibson in his novels, particularly in The Peripheral and its sequel, Agency. It describes a gradual, multi-faceted apocalypse rather than a single catastrophic event. This concept reflects ongoing crises that humanity faces, primarily driven by climate change and societal issues.

Ironically, the quoted text above came from the AI generated summery when I searched for the term via DuckDuckGo.

From the film Winter in Sokcho (2024) on Mubi.

Time is so cruel. It slips through your fingers like an eel.

Yeah!

When I read these words on the screen while watching the film (with English subtitles), I paused the movie to contemplate what they conveyed.

My reverie brought up thoughts about how, nowadays, I sometimes consider starting something and decide not to because I know I won’t have time to see it through to the end.

(Recent example: Starting a long book, trying to learn a new language, & cleaning out the storage room in my basement.)

I don’t think this happened to me when I was younger, or if it did, it didn’t happen as often as it does now. The reason for this: when I was young, I could honestly tell myself I had a lot more free time and a lot more tomorrows… Saying “I’ll do X later” or “I’ll get to X tomorrow” wasn’t necessarily a lie.

Now, experience has taught me that whenever I think I’ll get to something later or tomorrow, I quickly realize that’s probably not true. I recognize that sentiment as an appealing fiction, but a fiction nonetheless. I’ve come to really experience, acknowledge, and know that time slips through my fingers like an eel.

I’ve been using and exploring micro.blog for a few weeks now.

Verdict: It’s a product/service that I enjoy using a lot!

Today, I was thinking about what makes me love using it so much. I came up with several things, but the most notable was that using it feels the way it felt to use the internet around 2005-2010, which was such a fun time for me.

I’m going to keep thinking about this.

From The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, by Catherine Clément

all psychoanalytic practice is based on the ability to hear something other than what the patient says. on the capacity to hear, within the conscious message enunciated by the speaker, the patterns produced by the unconscious. (p. 36)

I’m finding Clément’s uncomplicated way of describing psychoanalysis very enjoyable.

From The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, by Catherine Clément

The unconscious is not directed toward a goal. It plays and then it settles down. (p. 33)

Yeah.

From The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, by Catherine Clément

About love nobody ever spoke better than Lacan […] Love was a permanent presence, ever so lightly touched upon as he - lingered lazily, lengthily over the dead ends of desire, the desperations of fantasy, and the impossibility of “sexual intercourse.” In Lacan’s system, which is less inflexible and less fully worked out than some people think, love will no doubt remain one of the few escapes, perhaps the only one. Love was a door which, unlike the others, was not closed. A door left ajar. (p. 21)

There are several interesting things in this.

1. Lacan’s system is less inflexible and not fully worked out.
2. The importance of love as an act, as a creative act within Lacan’s thought.

From The Kohut Seminar: On Sslf Psychology and Psychotherapy with Adolescents and Yoong Adults.

Coleridge spoke of “the willing suspension of disbelief,” there is also a necessity for the willing suspension of disbelief when you listen to a particular mode in which a topic is presented to you. I do not suggest the willing suspension of disbelief forever; I suggest only a suspension of disbelief until you have grasped what the other person has to offer. In other words, one does not object before one has first heard the other person out to some extent. (p. 4)

Yeah. Very well said .

This morning, one of my four kids (he’s 5) said, “Today is a good day!” Immediately after he said this, the song Today by The Smashing Pumpkins started to play in my head, and I started to hum it as I made breakfast.

“What song are you humming, Dad?” Asked the oldest boy, he is close to 7.

I told him what it was.

“Can we listen to it?” He asked. I played it for him via Apple Music, and the next song that the algorithm put in the rotation was Pictures of You by The Cure.

The five year old listened to Robert Smith sing and said, “This is a beautiful song.”

In that moment, I felt lots of things.

Monday morning. I’m sick with something; it doesn’t seem serious, but it definitely impairs my ability to think clearly and quickly. I’m operating at a very slowplace today.

Perhaps this can be viewed as a good thing, a kind of physical body event that is making me do something I want to do anyway: Slow down.

I’m also not able to even attempt to have multiple things going on. (I’ve misplaced a mug of coffee– It’s somewhere, but I don’t know where– and a cap to my water bottle…). This could also be a good thing. Right? Because it makes me focus on one thing at a time.

Of course, keeping this going when my normal, not-sick system settings are restored will not be easy.

From an interview with George Saunders in The Atlantic, where Saunders is talking about admitting to what we have gotten wrong, as opposed to avoiding it in all the ways we can avoid owning up to what we have done or failed to do.

And as they got older, we would have talks with [our kids] where we’d say, You know, we kind of messed that up. Sorry. And it’s amazing how that kind of just takes the wind out of any negative sails, to just admit it.

Yeah.

An association: This reminds me of one of the many 12 step sayings, “You’re only as sick as your secrets.”

If keep something I’ve really messed up a secret, it can really mess with me a lot… it takes effort to keep something a secret. Admitting to what I’ve done wrong, or poorly, or failed to do, is not fun, but it takes less energy than keeping something a secret.

I wish I understood how synthesizers worked.

From the book Winnicott: Life and Work by Robert Rodman (Amazon)

Her beliefs in the supernatural, evidenced by the notion that Lawrence of Arabia was communicating with her through a parrot, further suggest that at the very least, she was not accustomed to the rigors of scientific thought. (p. 53)

What a great sentence that is.

From Being & Having by Gabriel Marcel.

There is no privileged state which allows us to transcend time

Yeah.

Looking out the window at the cold slowly day outside brought up many memories of days like this when I was young.

The clearest memories were from when I was a student at a community college who would go to Borders Books, Misic, & Cafe to study… and (rather often) avoid studying by reading things that had nothing to do with my studies.

I found it interesting to notice/pay attention to what it felt like to remember these days from the past in my present.

What stood out was the feeling of wanting to be someplace warm, with a book, in close proximity to (but not talking to) other oeople.

This feeling that was invoked as I stood inside a warm place and looked out into a cold snowy outside, and it was the same feeling today as it was some 20 years (!) back.

The feeling is a bridge, a connection between me then and me now, between an affective experience then and now.