“Shitty Flow”—and Why We’re Addicted to It

One of the themes we’ve circled in the past few weeks is the way that the modern world can hijack our values. This principle was recently articulated by the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen in an episode called “How Metrics Make Us Miserable.” Thi told us that he became a philosopher to answer the biggest questions in life but discovered, in grad school, that everybody around him mostly cared about numbers. Journals were ranked by status: numbers. The university departments were ranked by status: more numbers. Individual researchers had their own H-scores and other public quantifications of prestige: numbers, numbers, and numbers. And this cult of quantification completely took over his life. The internal value of “I want to answer the world’s deepest questions” becomes replaced by the external value of “make number go up.”

What do we call this extraordinary force for bulldozing our values and replacing them with something outside us—synthetic, bureaucratic, inauthentic? Let’s call it the machine. If you become a philosopher to discover the meaning of life but work only on the papers that you think will end up in journals scored highly by a bureaucracy you’ll never see … that’s the machine. If you’re a podcaster who wants to answer the most compelling questions in the world but ends up just focusing on rage-bait political news because that’s what YouTube fingers are clicking on, that’s the machine.

What’s the opposite of the machine? It’s something a little different than success. It’s success plus the ability to hold our values in the face of external systems that try to crush them. Today’s guest, Brad Stulberg, calls it: excellence. Today’s podcast is about excellence.

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Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Brad Stulberg
Producer: Devon Baroldi

The Way of Excellence by Brad Stulberg