Someone around me said that pickleball is cursed, but they can't figure out exactly why, and it made me think that it's basically made for those who want to do sports, but without actually doing sports. Obviously, if I had to play against the best players on Earth, I am sure they would destroy me, the game isn't so limiting that there is no range in how good you can be. But still, there is this general sense I get that it's fundamentally a non-serious activity, which is fine in an important way, I would rather have people play pickleball than stay indoors and scroll all day on a phone.
But it's not serious and I think it's important to recognize when something or someone isn't serious, because otherwise it adds onto the pile of bullshit discourses where we are meant to pretend that everyone is just as good as everyone else, so that we don't have to hurt anyone's feelings.
Most people are not serious about anything, they just want to get by in life. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily so, it's difficult to say at scale because people are so different from one another, and we need a variety of attitudes to function with one another, but what is undeniably bad is when people stop recognizing what commitment and greatness really look like, and when our world starts accepting mediocrity more and more.
Some other examples of wanting to do an activity without having to commit to it are:
§1. Coloring books, for people who want to do art without actually doing art.
§2. Duolingo, for people who want to learn a bunch of words and sentences in a language, but don't actually want to learn the language properly, which requires you to think in that language and build sentences in it from the get-go. 1
§3.People who focus on saving pennies in thousands of places, instead of looking at their entire relationship with money, and the biggest expenditures that they have, not just in terms of money but also in terms of time and energy. Being able to live without a car saves you a lot more money than something like going to 5 different stores to get slightly better deals for your groceries—which incidentally requires more driving and time—or being obsessed with freebies
§4. History channels which present you with a bunch of random and fun anecdotes from the past, without ever giving you a general understanding of a period, and how it relates with the rest.
§5. Same thing with "science" channels which talk about random facts, or "maths" channels which talk about isolated concepts, or "philosophy" channels which seem to boil down to political or media analysis, which are then a convenient excuse to talk about a thinker's ideas, without ever an overarching perspective on life. The problem I have with those channels is that there is never a concern with attending to a whole, whether it is the whole of a field which you want to get an overview of, or the whole of your life in the case of philosophy. They are merely interesting isolated bits of information.
§6. Those sites built around learning maths by solving very small problems, such as Brilliant.org. This one is interesting because maths classes tend to be so awful that those sites are probably useful in an important way, but there is this general aura of unseriousness about it, because from what I've seen, the problems are so ... irrelevant? Tiny? Which to be fair, are exactly the type of questions you would get on an exam, so perhaps it's the entire way that maths is taught which is unserious
§7. Drawing "tutorials" focused on specific subjects, such as learning to draw a dragon or a specific anime character through copying, instead of learning the fundamentals and how to apply them in any situation.
§8. Writing classes, which I personally never took because they seem so awful from a distance. From what I can tell, they focus a lot on general structures, such as the direction of your plot, or tropes, or character types, or principles like "show, don't tell", which are all very good of course, but the substance of a story can only be achieved through thousands upon thousands of hours of writing and reading.
If you have the general skeleton of a story, and it's a setup that sounds exciting to you, then great, but will you actually write the hundreds of pages start to end? Will you fill it with delightful descriptions, and engaging dialogues, and hilarious moments of slice of life which reveal a character's life in an instant, and fateful moments of the plot which are both surprising but also completely inevitable?
There are hundreds, if not thousands of small problems needed to solve to make a good story, and those can only come from a long study of good texts, and tons of personal attempts, and I'm not convinced that writing classes would address that long grind very much.
§9. Relationship advice which consist in a list of hundreds of small tweaks you can make to show that you care about your partner, instead of a deep examination of yourself and your relationship.
For instance, a woman would never say that a man is a coward, or lacks ambition, or that she is disgusted by his lack of care, or that she doesn't feel loved by him, even though those might be what she is feeling deep down. Instead, she will complain about a hundred different small things, and those small details might be what people talk about with one another, because people collectively speaking never want to examine themselves deeply.
If you are someone who is serious about their relationship, and doesn't want to have the same type of trainwrecks which people everywhere have in their own life, you need to look beyond trifling details about relationships and examine yourself honestly: do you love the other person? Do you want to build something beautiful with them? Are you able to stay alone by yourself without the desperate need of someone else's company? Do you love life in general? Are you willing to face your fears for something bigger than just your own comfort and safety?
Those are the important questions, the ones which most people are collectively engaged in ignoring, because looking at the individual trees is far more comforting than looking at the woods, which tends to reveal how unloving, insecure and cowardly people are deep down.
Here are some more controversial ones:
§10. People taking up photography when they want to do art without committing to the ones that takes thousands of hours of practice, like drawing, painting, playing an instrument, etc. It is quite controversial to say that there are lesser forms of art, and that photography for instance isn't as involved as painting, which is why photographers aren't anywhere near as distinct from one another as master painters are in their craft.
§11. Taking up religious or spiritual practices but doing them on auto-pilot, as a surrogate for taking responsibility for your life and living more consciously. For instance, someone who routinely attends the confessional but doesn't actually want to change their behavior, and only wants to feel good about being openly bad. Or someone who meditates a lot on the cushion but isn't able to carry the same "peace" and "blissfulness" into their daily life, the type of people who could call "bliss junkies".
§12. Reading tweets, as a surrogate for engaging with reading entire books. Listening to podcasts is another popular surrogate for engaging with essays and books.
§13. Saying that anime and video games are as artistically deep as literature. Reading is an interesting one, because there isn't a low-effort version of it from what I can tell. Even trashy novels are high-brow for a lot of people nowadays, because they require you to actually sit down in silence and read them, an effort which most people cannot be bothered with in the age of screens.
§14. Therapy being used as a non-serious way to pretend that you want to change yourself, when you don't. This one is tricky because it's part of a much broader societal trend, which is self-deception about the nature of people's problems, so in an important way I cannot blame people for going to therapy since they simply don't know any better, and there are some genuinely good therapists working in all kinds of modalities. But it still is a vivid example in my mind of someone who wants to pretend to change themselves without actually getting to the root.
There are two types of non-serious behavior: low-effort activities, which maps to the external, and pretend introspection, which maps to the internal.
Duolingo is lower effort than speaking and thinking in another language, pickleball is lower effort than tennis, and podcasts are lower effort than reading. Some of these points can be controversial for people who are attached to their specific activity, but those do not receive anywhere near as much backlash as the ones which have to do with our interiority.
You might be able to convince a photographer that painting is a higher form of art than photography, but if you dare suggest to a coward that they are using journaling to avoid having to make changes in their life and face their fears, then you can be sure that they will engage in all forms of mental gymnastics to show that you are dumb and don't know them very well.
Which is to say that pretend introspection is much more self-deceptive than low-effort activities are. The unconscious ego can only maintain itself through self-deception, which means that any glimpse of the Truth of its whole life must be dealt with in a variety of ways: ignorance, denial, anger, to the point of violence even, ridicule, or even co-option. 2
Ultimately, I am not that interested in convincing people that some things are more serious and involved than others. The people who are serious will simply outlast those who aren't. Just like the Truth is what is the case, which we cannot run away from forever and will eventually enter in our life, even if it has to take the form of our own Death to do so, the people who are serious are those who are in tune with Reality, are able to direct their attention and create things of lasting value, and who can ultimately tap into something which is beyond their self—their biases, prejudices, likes and dislikes and so on.
The truly committed man has no need to argue with others, because his entire life is the argument, it speaks for itself, which is why any serious person knows when to shut up, and let the babbling fools talk themselves to death.
1 Obviously it takes a lot of time for someone to subconsciously think in a new language, but still, the illusion of learning languge in classes is that you can somehow learn it through translation, which is simply not the case. When you are translating, you have to do the cognitive work of engaging in two languages at once, which is why people who only learn languages in school, which uses the translating approach, cannot speak fluently at all. It's not just that they don't have enough practice, or a big enough vocabulary, it's that there is a whole muscle which they never learned to flex, which is the ability to speak in a foreign language without having to translate from another one.
2 Such as how large businesses co-opt the practice of meditation so that their employees can deal with their anxiety, i.e. remain functional as cogs in the machine, as opposed to a practice which makes you more attuned to Reality and yourself.
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Seriousness Distraction Infantilization Selfdeception
2025-12-21