My friend Noah Kumin wrote a wonderful piece for the Unherd website, called “A Russian Novel Saved my Mind,” and it is that rare example of opinion writing that, in order to fully digest the themes and ideas it brings to the forefront, warrants a full read, start to finish. I highly recommend digging in. (His debut novel, Stop All the Clocks, will be published in June on Arcade Books: I’ve already read it and it is fantastic).

The part of Noah’s piece that truly reached me was its emphasis on ambivalence as somewhat of a lost art in today’s unimaginative era, a literary value that we forget at our peril and which perhaps may yet rescue us from our decadent and spectacle-laden spiral downwards into post-cultural anomie. Absent at this time across almost the entirety of our media landscape, a resurgence in the art of ambivalence could return us to a moment when literature was a portal to other minds and deeper realities, something which neither our wafer-thin prestige drama nor our kaleidoscopic commentariat could ever hope to achieve. Save us from these overly defined hot takes and dopamine-infused cheap thrills, the incessant chum within our endless scrolls and autoplay binges. It’s time for a new diet and ambivalence is one of the new main ingredients.

It seems like an important thing to remember, especially as a writer. I’ve taken notice over the last several years not only as to where my attention is being drawn but also to how the objects of my attention shape my writing. What has happened is a rather conspicuous bifurcation, a dividing line between, on the one hand, a trendy hyperpolitical preoccupation and, on the other, a kind of more classical and innocent wonder that draws me to material I as a habit woefully ignore—poetry, essays, novels. It is in these latter categories that ambivalence is key. The political, current-events-oriented stuff of the former category is all about hard nuggets of opinion, the dreaded “hot take” and I am guilty of spending way too much time in this rather “unambivalent” latter sphere.

My reading list is a huge culprit here, which is almost entirely made up of political science literature, psychology books and online op-eds and blog posts. It has split my approach to my own writing in half. For this Substack, for example, I tend to engage with some form of opinion making and “takes” but, by contrast, for the book I’m writing I reserve my more literary voice.

How might the problem of the missing contemporary value of ambivalence shed light on the fact of this kind of bifurcation in style and approach which I think I’m suffering from?

There’s no denying the small currency ambivalence has in today’s era, especially when composing and also consuming all of that flighty material we tend to find online. Most of the nonfiction that is posted on Substack and published in the opinion pages of online periodicals can hardly be considered literary and often rises very little above the quality of the social media posts of any given member of the selfsame commentariat who generate all this material in the first place. I’ve read 30-tweet long Twitter threads that land a bigger punch than some of the dreck that makes it even into the “august” pages of the New York Times. For this kind of writing, some sort of “take” is needed, a kind of hard nugget of insight to which the author must “stick” in their piece. As is easily predicted, political and current events writing abounds within this sphere: shouting into the scrum of 24/7 opinion-making has a kind of centripetal force and strikes those of us invested in these stories—like me <over here, over here>—with the sharp pangs of FOMO. None of this material is primary, but merely the secondary or even tertiary dregs of hyperactive mainstream media. In order to “have our say,” we need to come up with some hot take whose half-life can make it at least to the end of the day before the next round of hot takes concerned over some new frivolous news item again start flooding the zone.

Whatever other virtues might be said of it, the “hard nugget” or “hot take” is not a literary element that thrives in ambivalence. It is a closed-system, perversely at odds with itself as it seeks to enclose the object of its inquiry with a discursive fence it knows can never fully hold it in. In this sense, the hot take is perhaps the very opposite of poetry which is an alive, evolving, dynamic, literary entity that swims in ambivalence and openness. The hot take is, by contrast, a “fenced in” element, destined for swift obsolescence in its isolation. The reason why we keep reading a Robert Frost poem—but perhaps not an op-ed by some opinion writer from the same era—is because the poem has no real “expiration date”: it isn’t bounded by the hard temporality of the magazine article or the politics take.

During my regrettable days on Twitter, I became addicted to these hot takes and was desperate to begin conversations with whomever might engage with them, often setting aside way too much time to honor this habit. Like an alcoholic ruminating over their lost spring day afternoons spent indoors nursing pints in a darkened pub, I rued how I drained my schedule with panicked verbiage over basically nothing. The participatory glee I felt “contributing” to the discussion of whichever political news item du jour was in play was compelling in its own right but its pleasures were brittle and fleeting.

A half hour after writing twitter threads with strange right-wingers in distant lands, arguing in a darkened room about the merits of due process or the fallaciousness of antique race theories, my head spinning from the intake of my drug, I would fold the laptop and walk the dogs, the sun now a kind of unrequited friend whose extreme daylight became the anger he felt over my tardiness. Now in the reality of the day, my twitter screeds felt utterly pointless. But I would be right back at it later that night or the next day, the effects of the drug withered and my thirst for “contribution” renewed.

Substack is for now a worthwhile methadone treatment to the heroin of my Twitter days, a relatively undisturbed environment through which to broadcast my natural desire for these kinds of participatory efforts. It has not yet become enshitified—though it is only a matter of time before that fate also befalls this platform—and so there is still a measure of salubriousness in the attempt to give a hot take here and there once in a while.

I wonder what fuels my consumption of current events and political content, the desire to broadcast my opinions here or a legitimate interest in worldly matters?

When I read the news am I just ramming my blog post cannon or are these bursts from my artillery the natural extension of a legitimate desire to stay current?

It is likely a little of both. I have always been an avid partaker in the state-of-the-art of opinion making and taking; but this proclivity is today supercharged by the frenetic hyperpolitical era in which we find ourselves now at the “End of the End of History.”

Speaking to my late therapist of the trials of FOMO and the fear of obsolescence, he reminded me of something Carl Jung once wrote about when he spoke of the need to imagine oneself as either a “man of the spirit” or a “man of the times.” Clearly, in my desperate hopes of continuing to feel included, I have gone out of my way to occupy the latter register, a person trying to bake complete thoughts into hard nuggets that I throw into the scrum of contemporaneity, hoping that these salvoes will keep me afloat in the present. I sacrifice depth, refusing to dig into anything, in order to gain currency with the ephemerality of the era. I seek to be “of the times.”

Thankfully, the book that I have been writing, my attempt at a healthy ambivalence, has been functioning as a kind of inoculant against my frothy hot takes and anxious commentary. It definitely points me towards being “a man of the spirit.” When I work on my personal essays, I am not writing for something so transitory as the internet. The internet is a preoccupied guest, a visiting tourist who is Airbnb’ing your room and whose mind is fixated on getting in as many museums as possible. It isn’t interested in actually going deep with you while it stays with you. “Talk to me about something that I can see right now,” it asks of you.

Books don’t do this.

Books will get published and, unlike the servers powering our clouds of data, revisions to the words that are printed on them will not take the seconds at the mere click of a mouse doing an upload, but long years after editors decide that an update is worthy of the costs. This means that what you put in those books the first time around better count for something and—what’s more—they better last.

And if they are to last, it is best they are ambivalent indeed.

The art of the personal essay, much like how my friend Noah Kumin argues about the novel in his piece, is very much the art of the embrace of uncertainty and openness. The personal essay is more akin to the poem, a genre in a perennial bow towards eternity, than it is to an article, a more disposable piece of literature: the essay must ask questions that dig and do everything it can never to fill the hole. The latter task is for the generations of readers. The difference between a personal essay and an op-ed article is the difference between a vast ocean and a small pond. The esteemed essayist Charles D’Ambrosio writes in the introduction of his seminal collection Loitering that he had worked on the essays in the collection for a “stupidly long time.” It takes a long time to write something that is to be preserved, that is going to make it long after we ourselves are gone. (He also mentioned in the introduction that he bristled when his friends called his essays “articles”). Like the best architecture, these pieces better be built on strong foundations.

But if we are to concern ourselves with the vast oceans that is the good writing in physical books, they must be open to interpretation. They must be so awestruck with the flexibility of the human experience, with the knowledge of how this species shall never succumb to the strictness of the secular, manmade machine of post-industrial life, with the knowledge that we will never, ever entirely “get” ourselves, that they can only bother themselves with the readers of the future. These pieces must last for people we can’t picture in our minds any more clearly than Shakespeare could picture a 21st Century drama student in the post-industrial West reading Macbeth. These readers must have the same degree of immediacy as contemporary readers do. In order to have such aliveness it must be on a page in a book, not on a server on a screen. It’s what makes this type of writing so very different than the one-offs and one-and-dones of internet writing and Netflix teleplays.

Of course, this does little to stop me from continuing to fall to temptation. Twitter, you may yet have something for me. The man of the times dies slowly.

The space that I need to put myself in in order to carry out the task of ambivalence is a delicate one: I cherish my quiet mornings, downcast with the still awakening sun, my brain in a tumultuous muddle that is eager to participate in the aliveness of this writing project. Coffee takes on a talismanic role, the earthy brackishness resting on my tongue as a conduit to rare energies. It is only in these spare hours after dawn—with the events of the later more secular part of the day breathing down my neck or waiting at the doorstep in order to pounce and devour this sacred quiet—that I am able to submerge into ambivalent writing and lose myself. The cold discreteness of the world will very soon banish this inchoate vulnerability. But for the time being I write stuff for which the internet periodicals, to say nothing of Substack or Mailchimp, are as unsuitable a destination as the cold, hard, oxygen-deprived Martian landscape is to moth orchids imperiled by small breezes.