A good heuristic for when a title is bad is that it contains two or more separate ideas or even subjects. This does not mean that not doing this makes the title good, but I hold this as a fairly necessary condition for a good title. I do not care about titles in and of themselves, the way that for instance someone optimizing for engagement might try to reverse engineer which ones become viral or not (a somewhat demonic activity in my opinion) but I do care about them in the context of how they manifest someone's intention.
It is surprising how few people can be decisive about anything in their lives. I am often shocked at how some people seem to agonize as to what to order in a restaurant, as if they had to decide the fate of what they would eat for the rest of their lives. The fact that they hesitate so much for such trivial matters makes me wonder how they approach decisions of real importance.
Closer to my interests, a lot of writers who have grown up on the internet seem to have a fairly pronounced orientation towards novelty, and as a result they might write up essays titled "Qabalah, Neon Genesis Evangelion and the Cold War". I totally made this one up, but the general (anti) aesthetic of cobbling up together such disparate ideas is very common on the internet, especially with how podcast episodes are titled, which seem to follow the convention of listing all the main topics mentioned in the conversation.
In a sense I can see why this is done. A podcast is usually a fairly experimental and breadth-oriented medium. It points to the writings of an author, their interests, but if you want to get to the meat of their work, you go to their books, which have had more time to develop a unity of intention. For instance, can you imagine if George Orwell's 1984 was named "Mass Surveillance, Perpetual War and Suppression of Speech"? It would be a laughably terrible title for a book, yet most podcasts title their episodes that way. It would certainly be very descriptive of the content of the book, but all of the aura and atmosphere evoked by the title "1984" is utterly gone.
Where does aura come from anyway? Ultimately it has something to do with the unity and uniqueness of someone or some place. A patchwork 1 of clothes could never confer someone an aura the way an outfit would, a painting with disharmonious colors and a weak composition produces very little effect, and the aura of a city comes from a harmony of its architecture, its climate and the people there.
This concern for a unifying aesthetic seems rather rare on the internet, and I think it's because the incentive structures on digital media push towards a lack of friction, which enables easy access to a breadth of information, but unification comes from a combination of constraints—notice how the examples I gave have a great deal of constraint from the physical world—and an orientation towards depth (of quality).
Constraints get a bad rep in an age which is all about pushing boundaries and limits until they are out of sight, starting of course with Death, the primal limit which all humans must face in their life, but which in modernity is treated as an abstraction, as something which happens to others but never yourself. But one of the main differences between a child and an adult is their relationship to limits.
Children are so free of any concerns that they never think about limits and constraints, which is why they are so keen on trying anything that comes in their experience, but also why they can be so naive when it comes to the consequences of their own actions. Adults on the other hand are much more aware of limits, whether those of their physical body, their limited time and the fact that their potential can ultimately only actualized in a certain direction.
This confrontation with limits can paralyze them with fear, but with the mature adult we get a totally different story, one where someone gets in full contact with their death, not just as an idea but as a reality which penetrates down to their marrow, and which infuses them with a gravitas which others try to imitate but ultimately never embody in their life.
The reason why I started this piece on the importance of holding a single intention is precisely because I have been so terrible at managing my time and energy and I wish to do better. Would this concern exist if I had far more time in my life? I don't think so. I think limits are valuable teachers if we listen to them. Whether they are necessary to learn the lessons related to maturity is another question, and in my opinion not a very significant one. I am a mortal human being with finite time, energy and attention, so what can I do with this? This strikes me as an adult question. A childish question—which is different from a question which a curious child would ask—would try to refute the current reality and fantasize that immortality or this or that ideology might solve all of his problems.
It is also ironic that this piece started with a strong intention, which is the importance of having one intention per title and per piece, but ended up meandering across subjects of aura, unity, constraints and Death. At the end of the day I am quite fond of talking about a lot of subjects, but I also recognize that I do not have all the time in the world, and that I can decide to use it consciously, or let myself squander it and blame others for my problems.
If you ever find yourself with a lack of direction in your life, I think it's fair to say that Death is quite clarifying when it comes to what is worth putting your time and energy into. It is not the only teacher in Life, but it is one that we ignore at our perils.
1 I have learned a nice term to express the mish-mash of parts we often see in modernity: kludge, also spelled "kluge", pronounced like "judge". The definition is: 'An ill-assorted collection of poorly-matching parts, forming a distressing whole' (Granholm); esp. in Computing, a machine, system, or program that has been improvised or 'bodged' together; a hastily improvised and poorly thought-out solution to a fault or bug."
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2025-07-30