You Must Change Your Life

Marginalia, Vol. 2: Attention and the examined life

Welcome to Ever Not Quite—essays about technology and humanism.

This is the second installment in a limited series I started here a few weeks ago, where I’m sharing some more personal writing that falls outside of my usual essay format. It’s a bit different, so let me know how it’s landing with you.

First, though, I want to thank Vincent Kelley from Handful of Earth for including Ever Not Quite in a list of favorite Substacks of 2025. Vincent reads a great deal of the writing which the internet has to offer, both on and off Substack, for his “Weekly Grounding” collections which come out each Friday, so the accolade carries the distinction of real authority.

And here’s a link to my last essay, which was about the new book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, as read through the conceptual lens provided by Jacques Ellul. It is intended less as a wholesale endorsement of the arguments of either book than as an attempt to show how the perspective of the latter might round out the incomplete picture supplied by the former:

Technology Is Already ‘Out of Control’

“We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention.” Henry David Thoreau, “Life Without Principle”

You Must Change Your Life

There is a sonnet by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke called “Archaic Torso of Apollo” which concludes with Rilke’s famous imperative: “Du mußt dein Leben ändern”—You must change your life.

In the context of the poem, that final injunction arises from an encounter with beauty which the poet experiences with a jolt, as a call to an urgent re-orientation—or, for the religiously minded, perhaps even repentance in its original sense, which doesn’t express regret so much as a change in one’s mind or purpose, a return to a more fundamental reality.

This past June brought one of the most unusual weeks of my life. Upon my arrival at the Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life in upstate New York, I was handed a canvas tote bag with Rilke’s directive—untranslated from the German—stenciled on the side. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised; the Center is an uncommon place, a refuge for contemplation which Matthew Strother had wanted to change the people who, by some happy fortuity, find themselves standing in front of the Center’s main barn, as I myself had just done.

“The word contemplation”, the philosopher Adam Robbert has noted, “means to “mark out a space for observation” or “to gaze attentively”:

The suffix templum in the word is the same as in the word “temple,” which in a more literal and concrete way also “marks out a space for observation,” as one might find in a monastery, retreat center, or library.¹

The Matthew Strother Center has the feel of all three, and its pastoral setting reminds you that this was a working farm not all that long ago. It isn’t only that a seminar may be momentarily interrupted by the squawk of one of the chickens who spend their days roaming the property, but in addition to reading and discussion, students spend a few hours each day doing manual labor on the property and assisting with all the daily gestures of hospitality required to meet the needs of the small improvised community.

This was Matthew’s vision, and it is the ongoing work of the Center which bears his name and sustains his memory: to mark out a space for deep reading and meaningful conversation about texts of enduring insight and beauty in the company of a committed circle of kindred learners, refugees from the land of usefulness. We each arrived, there can be no doubt, with our own implicit sense of just what the program was really about, what, exactly, was the larger predicament to which the Center was addressing itself, and what it intended for us to take back into the lives and places we had just temporarily left behind.

You can learn more about Matthew here.

My less-than-totally-clean tote bag after carrying it everywhere around the farm for a week.

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I first learned of the Matthew Strother Center right here on Substack, in a piece in Persuasion by the essayist, critic, and former English professor William Deresiewicz, who had taught a program in its first season in 2024.² Not only had Matthew been one of Deresiewicz’s undergraduate students years earlier, he seems to have made an indelible impression. “He loved school”, Deresiewicz later wrote of Matthew in a piece for The Hinternet. “[O]r at least the ideal of it: a small group of people studying together, seriously and unprofessionally, learning for the sake of learning and conversing on the fundamental things.”

But Matthew sensed intuitively the deficiencies of the academic culture where he was enrolled, which was oriented more towards career than contemplation, and he wanted to recover what he felt were the true existential stakes which learning ought to have—less a transaction than a transformation. “It’s hard to build your soul when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs”, Matthew once lamented to his teacher concerning the prevailing attitude among his colleagues, who were more apt to view education through the lens of remuneration and prestige than as the unmediated encounter with reality which is the essence of intellectual freedom.

Some years after he graduated, Matthew began to devise a plan for a school of his own, one which would be truer to the purpose of education as he had come to conceive of it, a school which, as Deresiewicz describes it, would

marry rigorous group study of literary and philosophical texts with mindful living and abstention from technologies of communication. It would be a face-to-face community, a retreat from distraction, a school for adults. It would be small, self-governing, contemplative, and free of charge.

The Matthew Strother Center has no explicit goal; its students do not labor in the pursuit of an end-product apart from learning for its own sake. Indeed, its vision well embodies the ‘use of the useless’ which was the subject of an essay which I posted here earlier this fall.

In its bid to support this increasingly counter-cultural theory of education, the Center is but one instance among many ongoing experiments within the emerging ecosystem of what some are calling “para-academia”.³ I myself am not in a position to catalog first hand the missteps and indiscretions of mainstream institutions which have accelerated this exodus, but if you’ve been following, for instance, Adam Walker’s recent series of essays about higher education and its discontents, you will recognize both the rationale and the spirit which animates the movement which is now taking shape outside the walls of the ivory tower, and closer to the ground than it ever cared to bother with.⁴ Walker is the founder and principal teacher at Versed, an online platform which hosts courses and discussions for readers of poetry. Many of the other students I met at the Matthew Strother Center came to it through The Catherine Project, which was founded in 2020 by Zena Hitz and where Matthew himself took classes in Ancient Greek.

The question of why so many readers are turning to these sorts of programs is best answered by Deresiewicz’s succinct reply: Because they have to go somewhere. People won’t just surrender their interest in literature or philosophy when the institutions which have traditionally stewarded these subjects at the highest level have, whether by their own free choice or under financial duress, decided to sideline, defund, de-emphasize, and undermine them in the pursuit of imperatives which are antithetical to the spirit of humanistic education. Many will have to find new ways to engage in the slow work of cultivating the intellect and imagination—and that’s exactly what they’re doing.

“Leisure, it must be remembered, is not a Sunday afternoon idyll, but the preserve of freedom, of education and culture, and of that undiminished humanity which views the world as a whole.” Josef Pieper, “Leisure: The Basis of Culture”

And so it was that I became one of five students to arrive one day in late spring and immediately began to take the measure of whatever it was I had just become a part of. The Matthew Strother Center draws students from all walks of life, and its teachers are typically academic break-aways on loan from the more conventional precincts of higher-ed. Our program, however, was taught by an ER doctor with a particular penchant for Russian literature. Together, we read and discussed two short classics: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Mikhail Bulgakov’s A Country Doctor’s Notebook, the details of which were frequently illuminated by the presence among us of a practitioner of the Aesculapian arts.

Here is an account of our session which appeared last summer in Front Porch Republic by Elizabeth Stice—one of the other students whom I was lucky enough to meet during our time at the Center:⁵

If you ever watched MTV back in the day, you remember the opening of The Real World, which always went something like this: “This is the true story…of seven strangers…picked to live in a house…and have their lives taped…to find out what happens…when people stop being polite…and start getting real.” Mostly, my time at the Matthew Strother Center was nothing like The Real World. We were strangers and we did live in a house, but that was about it. For one thing, it was a low technology environment. No one filmed us. All the students put their phones away the day we arrived, and we each received a disposable camera. There was no confessional room. We all shared deep conversations over meals and walks and dishes and chores around the farm. We actually never stopped being polite. People were kind and generous even while they were sincere and honest. It may sound overly earnest, so I’ll go ahead and tell you that we had two evenings that included sock puppetry.

However much the books and morning seminars may evoke the pedagogy that still unfolds behind the doors of dwindling humanities departments, the Center’s mission is not exhausted by its scholarly aspect alone. Each night after dinner, we all gathered for an evening ‘salon,’ which involved group activities of all kinds. Its academic dimension is linked to these postprandial gatherings, daily chores, and shared meals by an implicit ethos centered on attention and presence. This is the reason for, and also the reward of, the low-technology policy.

Attention doesn’t just mean attending to a book in order to get more reading done; it is also the social attention required for shared and often creative undertakings: poetry recitation, board games, flower arranging, and as we discovered, sock puppetry. Everything that happens is co-created: it’s not just what’s said around the seminar table. It’s also enjoying the unadulterated presence of everyone sharing the experience with you. And it doesn’t take long before you find yourself marveling that you might ever feel the need to look at a notification on your phone.

“When people long for some kind of escape, it’s worth asking: What would “back to the land” mean if we understood the land to be where we are right now? Could “augmented reality” simply mean putting your phone down? And what (or who) is that sitting in front of you when you finally do?” Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing

The whole experience—and so simple a thing it is—has been known to bring some people to tears. No doubt the reasons are unique to each individual, but I suspect this has something to do with the fact that the total effect is such a sublime and uncommon gratuity of co-presence, a temporary sanctuary from a world beleaguered by technologically-mediated fragmentation. “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”, Simone Weil once wrote in a letter to a friend, the poet Joë Bousquet, some time in the early 1940s, much to the acclaim of contemporary meme-peddlers trafficking in inspirational quotes. But her viral observation has the virtue, at least, of being true, and the Matthew Strother Center is a testament to its insight, a place which encourages this simplest and most authentic embodiment of ‘philanthropy’ in the etymological sense.

The Matthew Strother Center is not a political institution in any straightforward way. In fact, the ceaseless thrust-and-parry of national politics as documented by the interminable revolutions of the news cycle is one of the very afflictions the Center’s low-technology policy insulates you from. Nor has it set out to unilaterally remake higher education. It’s too small, and the problems are too big. But I have come to make out a quiet countercultural program which unites all of its peculiar practices.

Here is how James Williams puts it in his 2018 book, Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy:

I used to think there were no great political struggles left. The truly epic defenses of freedom, I thought, had already been fought and won by generations greater than my own, leaving to my time only the task of dutifully administering our hard-earned political inheritance.

How wrong I was. The liberation of human attention may be the defining moral and political struggle of our time. Its success is prerequisite for the success of virtually all other struggles.⁶

The ancient Confucian classic the Great Learning remarks: “Things have their roots and branches. Affairs have their beginnings and their ends. To know what is first and what is last will lead one near the Way.”

Here’s how I’ve come to think about the lesson of that unusual week: From the benediction that is attention itself, a thread moves outward: it runs through our immediate surroundings, and only later, perhaps, discovers some larger purpose, furthest from its source. If humanistic education will settle increasingly into new pockets of intrinsically-motivated readers, it will be through innumerable unostentatious efforts of the attention, each one a small act of protest. But whatever larger meaning the “liberation of human attention” might turn out to have—and how could it not acquire such significance?—attention itself holds an understated generosity which justifies its primary place within all our moral, and perhaps even political, considerations.

Under just about any other circumstances, I would have driven home listening to an audiobook or a podcast. Instead, and to my own astonishment, I sat in a dazed silence for the entire two hour trip. Somehow, the idea of a bodiless voice issuing from the car speakers had been rendered strange in a way I would not have considered possible just over a week earlier. The Matthew Strother Center had done its work.

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You can make a tax-deductible donation to the Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life here. Donations help the Center to grow its capacity and serve more students in the future.

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Ipolit Strâmbu, In the Garden (1930). Oil on cardboard.

That’s all for now. I’ll be back in your inbox again in the coming days with another essay.

1. Adam Robbert, “Attention is an Art Form” in Practice in Still Life: Fragments, Essays, and Lectures, pg. 25 (the essay can also be found here).

2. In an interview with Sam Kahn of The Republic of Letters this past August, Deresiewicz called the Center “mind-blowingly good.”

3. Thanks to Emma Stamm for helping to name this phenomenon.

4. Here is Adam’s first essay about the state of higher education from this past July, but he has written several others in the months since. You will be rewarded for looking through the archive of Adam’s other writings.

5. Elizabeth is editor-in-chief at Orange Blossom Ordinary, a review with one foot in Florida and one foot in the life of the mind. From the website: “We are a forum for learning about new books and considering their ideas, hearing from authors, and accessing the world outside of ourselves.”

6. The digital edition of the book is available for free online from Cambridge University Press.