Reading with a Pencil in Your Hand

On a late summer afternoon in 1997, Dr. Melvyn New asked the handful of us who had signed up for his Modern Literary Theory course how we would define philosophy. At first, our answers were slow in coming. It was humid there in the bottom of Anderson Hall, and it felt like the air hadn’t circulated since sometime during the Reagan administration. We made some valiant attempts to answer, which Dr. New mostly took in stride, occasionally asking clarifying questions or highlighting an interesting point that a student had raised. After a few minutes, he said something that I still think about several times per year.

“Philosophy is discourse that opens.”

The statement hung heavy in the room. I wrote it down in my notebook. Dr. New pivoted and picked up a piece of chalk and wrote it on the blackboard.

“Philosophy is the opening of a dialogue. When a philosopher writes, he does so with the expectation of a reader. More importantly, he writes with the expectation of a reader with a pencil in his hand, making notes in the margins and then eventually writing a response to that essay. That new author also writes with the expectation of a reader who will, in turn, respond. It might be the first author. It might be a new author entirely. Philosophy is an unbroken conversation that has been going for thousands of years.”

During my time as an internet optimist, this was how I saw blogs. Eventually it was also how I saw social media like Twitter. I saw these media in contrast to the more transactional and immediate nature of text messages or workplace emails. Blogs, in my mind, were the opening of a dialogue. I wrote with the expectation that someone somewhere somewhen would be reading with their favorite text editor open, jotting notes about their thoughts and doing the first steps toward their own blog post. Maybe I would end up being their reader. Maybe it would be some other set of people. But that idea of an unbroken chain of discourse provided a comforting peace to my heart, a sort of deus ex scriptis for someone who was steadily leaving formal religion behind.

These days, as so often happens with language, “The Discourse” has taken on a far different connotation. It conjures images of some nebulous and stern-faced “they” who are just sitting at the margins waiting to find the internet’s topic and/or main character for the day. Today, we’re all talking about how a federal judge went BEAST MODE on Apple for their App Store crimes. Yesterday, we were all experts on tariffs and the stock market. Before that, we all had big feelings about trans people. The Discourse is a gale sweeping in off the ocean. You can try to ignore it and go about your business, but regardless, you’re going to be wet and miserable.

Probably because I’m something of a contrarian, I’m trying to resist the urge to jump on the fashionable discourse about how algorithms are making us all angrier to keep us scrolling. For the record, I don’t disagree with that thesis, but I do feel an urge as both a trained, obnoxious liberal arts shit and a working software engineer to problematize that simple narrative. We created those algorithms in the context of our larger culture for purposes that make sense within that context. Algorithmic feeds certainly have great influence on how we think. They arguably exploit “bugs” in our brains to alter our behavior in ways similar to gambling. However, they are ultimately amplifying aspects of our culture and behavior far more than they are altering our behavior and thinking.

I assure you from personal experience that the urge to simplify complex topics for rhetorical purposes predates the internet. To borrow a translation of Heidegger’s phrase, we are always already entangled with that cultural tendency as a natural consequence of being a part of the world. CliffsNotes have been around since 1958. Reader’s Digest has been published since 1920. The Ancient Greeks were writing “epitome” summaries of larger works for easier consumption over 2000 years ago. Twitter’s 140-character limit didn’t do this to you. The Discourse was always already within you.

I think all of us have experienced talking with someone who is clearly planning out their response to you even as they “listen” to you. The point you’re trying to flesh out in real-time is reduced to a couple of bullet points that someone can use as a jumping off point for a response. While this is a very human tendency that has likely been with us as long as we have had humans, this is precisely how a lot of modern conversation feels to me. In many respects, we have all become PR representatives, repping a complex set of ideological positions, political movements, favorite media, preferred consumer electronics brands, and vibes. We bring to every conversation our preexisting talking points that we’d like to discuss, and we look for every opportunity to move into our prewritten scripts of what we feel comfortable talking about. This certainly happens a lot on Twitter, Reddit, and Mastodon, but I increasingly find that it happens in both chat and face-to-face conversations. We have all reinforced this tendency, and it’s now a fully-ingrained habit, a default mode of existence, a reflex that happens without conscious thought.

I don’t find much value in conversation that is largely automatic. I don’t think it’s good for us. I also increasingly find myself thinking that spending our time reading, thinking about, and discussing things that actively distress and disrupt us emotionally is not helping us. When I spend an hour playing a game I love or reading a book that makes me think interesting thoughts, I feel any number of things—inspired, thoughtful, energized, contemplative…When I spend 30 seconds browsing headlines or even reading texts from people who have been steeping in those headlines, I mostly feel an intense and crippling anxiety that stops me from sleeping and makes me feel alone and scared. The anxiety might as well be a transmissible disease, carried through words and images rather than microbe-filled air.

Friends, I don’t care to go into the whole thing, but rest assured, I know how serious this moment is. I have skin in the game, motherfucker. But I can’t live like that. I can’t sustain a life like that. I can’t help other people when I’m fatigued and crying about what is happening right now and how much worse the things that are coming are. But please, dear reader, understand that my marginalized ass is an early warning sign for what this stuff is likely doing to you as well. You also likely can’t sustain a life like that, and I tell you from experience that you can’t sustain a movement to change anything like that. It’s not an appropriate fuel for the task.

I’m not advocating that you completely disconnect from The Discourse. In fact, I would argue that being in a chain of conversation with other humans is one of the most beautiful and sublime experiences we have. Don’t vilify phones or social media broadly like you’re some kind of Black Mirror episode made manifest. Instead, I’m advocating for a mindfulness about the words, images, and sounds you consume. Periodically and consistently check in with yourself and ask, “How is this making me feel? Is that how I want to feel right now? Does it make sense to keep doing this?”

And if you’re truly stuck, listen to this for an hour straight on repeat and then email me or write a post about it.

Read, watch, play, and listen with a pencil in your hand, jotting notes in the margins or on a convenient piece of scrap paper. Approach things with spirit of intellectual curiosity, and try to understand things on their own terms. Then, for the love of God, join the conversation and let’s make something beautiful together.

Works Cited / In Discourse With

• Derrida, Jacques. “Violence and Metaphysics.” Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass, e-book ed., University of Chicago Press, 1978.
• Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis, e-book ed., Duquesne University Press, 1969.
• New, Melvyn. Personal conversation. August 1997, basement of Anderson Hall.
• Growing Up in the Southern Baptist Church as a Queer Person. 1979–circa 2000. Personal experience.
• Persona 5 Royal. Developed by Atlus, published by SEGA, 2019.
• Mann, Merlin. “It Takes a Worried Man.” Merlin Mann, 22 Apr. 2025, https://merlin.ghost.io/grace/.

Alternate Titles

• Beneath the Mask
• Out of Step (With the World)