My comments on Erik Hoel's "Exit the Supersensorium"

Exit the Supersensorium

This is the best essay I’ve read all year (so far).

Erik’s piece explains why fiction is externalized dreaming (just like how cooking is externalized digestion), and why we must have standards in art (while the world tells us that standards are elitist, oppressive, unjust).

This article hit the bullseye for me. After college I "rediscovered" reading. I started cranking through non-fiction books. I would proudly tell others that I "don't watch shows", then quote David McCullough ("However little TV you watch, watch less.") Who has time for Netflix when there's Taleb to read?

But there's a certain feeling of emptiness that comes from only consuming the real. It was a vague, hard-to-pin-down feeling. But it's the jaundice Erik mentions. Now I watch some shows. But mostly I'm on fire for great novels. I have trouble describing how much better (richer? more scintillating?) I've found the best novels compared to typical entertainment. Every other page of "Middlemarch" has a Michelin-level sentence so beautiful that I have to pause for a moment to savor it. You can't help but have a high standard once you've been exposed.