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PaperclipPerfector  26d ago (text post)   24034 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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We've talked about Anthony Bourdain here a few times.

Here's this travel writer's account of following in his footsteps and after Bourdain finally meets with her and validates her, she has a bit of an identity crisis when she realizes he's a sad loser.

Firstly, being a travel journalist is not as glamorous as it looks, having tossed her cookies after eating token cooked goat brain and local fruit

The fast life always slows down, but not how you’d expect. After enough time, you just get used to the pace, then it doesn’t seem so fast.

The next day, I spent the entire afternoon curled up at the base of the porcelain throne, praying for salvation from the unwashed melon. I was going to stop doing drugs, I told myself. Nothing was worth the panic of a comedown. Then again, I’d said that several times before.

I began to realize that going to different countries wasn’t a solution to a life. I had stopped being able to outrun my problems. Eventually, life on the road just becomes regular life. Whereas most people escape for adventure, when you’re a travel writer, you start craving an escape to stability. But people keep telling you that you have a dream job.

With my head over the toilet, I came up with a plan to kill myself. It wasn’t about the fruit. It was about the fact that I was living out my dreams and I couldn’t feel anything. Life was meaningless and I saw only one way out. I was going to get a gun. I wasn’t going to leave a note.

But also, at some point she comes across an episode where Bourdain interviews Iggy Pop, the godfather of punk and his personal idol, and finds that an older and more mellow Iggy had come there from the gym, orders one drink, has the shrimp. Talks about how love and relationships are what sustain him now. It seems to crush Bourdain, who realizes the guy who invented live fast die young was just putting on an act, not leaving an instruction manual to be taken seriously.

Bourdain, who grappled with drug addiction and depression, kills himself at 61 during a bout of unrequited love.

I can't help but make the connection that the punk ethos and the travel-slutting ethos of taking the highs and the peaks and dodging the responsibilities and commitments, they might be a sign of enlightenment, or making the best of a cold uncaring world where nothing means anything, but probably it's an appealing outlet to the mentally ill and we should be skeptical of attempting to romanticize this kind of transience.

Quote our local @coffee_enjoyer back in 2024:

Here is the liberal-individualist boomer par excellence. He tours the world and waxes poetic on the quaint social life, yet considers himself above their primitive family and social ties. He sits down with large families to eat, he attends their communal festivals, and he transmits this all to the solitary Americans in their living room. He is the rootless cosmopolitan, an omni-tourist, an enjoyer of spectacle over substance. Seeing all these wonders of the world, he’s yet unable to internalize their moral significance and necessity. He is self-worshipping; he cooked himself an identity in Kitchen Confidential and was too blinded by pride to ever revise it. Bourdain wanted to be the cool Western individualist loner, enjoyer of all but adherent to none. He attended every place’s ritual meal — each one a eucharist, essential, consuming God — but only as the aloof tourist, the narrator. It was this pride and absence of self-reflection (one’s real needs and obligations) which is the deepest reason. He let his heart be captured by an exotic woman to fulfill his own self-image, the idol he worshipped, which led to his demise.

I am mostly unable to convince people in the progressive sphere that Bourdain's mental illness had anything to do with his lifestyle. Even Claude refuses to admit it. And adding the detail and sober account from this travel writer is met with the similar rejection. Mental illness just happens to people and living like a transient and dropping out of society and rejecting connection is just like, a totally valid way to live and says nothing about the mental state of the people living it, don'tchaknow? I just don't buy it, I guess.

I enjoyed travel slutting (and by this I mean extended tourism) and while I never identified with punk, for awhile I did the psychedelic Timothy Leary adjacent thing of trying to take drugs with numbers in their name and break out of default living, but ... it's kind of hard. And neither of these things are all that fulfilling at length. I'm not sure what's going through the heads of people who say they could just happily tour Europe or drop acid for forever. The fact that Bourdain is not a fringe figure but like a progressive hero meant to be celebrated and emulated is wild.

Say what you will about the lame conformity of marrying your sweetheart and having 2.3 kids and buying the house with a white picket fence and your thrills are drinking a beer, smoking a brisket and giving your wife a creampie every Saturday, but after seeing friends die so young or losing their minds or never really being able to hold a marriage together, to say nothing of the grim meathook reality I've seen traveling the third world, that lame conformist life looks more like a precious gift and I feel sorry for people who get conned into rejecting it.

I do think that a philosopher ought righty to be judged by his death. As Solon tells us, judge no man happy until his death. Similarly, we ought to judge no man wise unless we approve of his death. It seems relevant when discussing Foucault, and especially his work on human sexuality, that he dies of AIDS. The question of what one thinks of Socrates is mostly a question of what one thinks of the Hemlock, and of course there's Empedocles. Similarly, I admire David Foster Wallace's writing, but when people cite his philosophical insights from This is Water

By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

I think it's relevant to note that DFW hanged himself. Is that kind of radical empathy perhaps beautiful and perhaps true and perhaps admirable? Sure. But can you live with it? DFW couldn't, could he? Does this imply that this kind of effort to constantly consider the circumstances of everyone around you might be overwhelming, that in fact we need to degrade others to meaningless NPCs in order to survive the world we live in? Sure it would be nice to live in a world where we consider the circumstances of everyone in traffic with us and have empathy for them, but does that make living in a world with traffic impossible?

I think it's relevant to note that Bourdain hanged himself when considering his lifestyle and his life advice. I loved Kitchen Confidential, it's an upper-end beach read, and No Reservations was a great cable content show, a little higher brow than your typical cooking show but ultimately within the same format and the same relaxing emotional range.

But when one assesses the philosophical depth of his malattributed and oft-memed deepities, we should consider that Anthony Bourdain hanged himself, and that maybe that way of living doesn't actually work if it's most famous adherent wound up tying that knot. Willful suicide*, the negation of life, seems to undermine any idea of one knowing the way to the Good Life. And clearly there are a lot of people who still admire and seek to imitate Bourdain, when you consider that there's an active subreddit for him years after his autopsy. So it's relevant to talk about why he shouldn't be uncritically admired.

There's a flip side to this where people want to hate on Bourdain and say he wasn't that talented or that interesting, I've even seen accusations that he was a bad cook and a nepo baby in publishing, but I think that goes too far. He was a pretty good media celebrity, as they go. And I think there's something to enjoying oysters fresh off the beach. But we have to consider where it all ends up.

*I should note that the word "willful" is necessary, instrumental suicide like Socrates or other ancients choosing suicide as a particular form of death sentence, or the proverbial secret agent biting down on a cyanide molar to avoid torture, or a soldier jumping on a grenade, may meet the technical definition of self-killing, but they're rather different implications philosophically.

((As an aside, while I think it's valid to question someone's moral fiber or entire life philosophy as a result of their suicide, I don't think we should over-attribute someone's suicide to particular circumstances or the actions of other individuals. For every bad thing that happens to anyone that kills themselves, there are a dozen people who had the same thing happen and are still here. It's hardly common for an unfaithful model/actress gf to drive men to suicide. I knew people who killed themselves after divorce, but I know more people who didn't. I don't think you can really drive someone to suicide, some people kill themselves and some people don't in any given circumstance.))

Great post. For context, I would just like to add that I also enjoyed reading Kitchen Confidential and also binge watched a bunch of No Reservations episodes and would do it again.

Exactly. One can enjoy the philosopher and find the philosophy interesting, but one must grapple with the death.

Another good illustrative example of a writer/philosopher who offed himself: Hemingway. There's so much to admire in the Hemingway Hero, but then you have to ask about the shotgun waiting at the end of the line. Honest conversations about Hemingway's vision of masculinity and life cannot ignore the suicide. I love Hemingway, but his life philosophy must be considered in that context.

Foucault is undoubtedly one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his work on sexuality is seminal and must be grappled with. Ignoring him as a crank, dismissing him, is impossible if one is a philosopher. But one can't admire his work without asking questions about his death.

Lindyman actually posted on the same topic today:

This is the David foster Wallace mental trick of just coming up with fake narratives to attach on people so you don't get frustrated waiting in line in the grocery store[.] How[']d that work out for him?

DFW emphasizes the need to consciously reframe one's perspective to find meaning and avoid despair in mundane, everyday life, essentially treating the world as a projection of individual thought patterns. This approach reinforces an isolated view of the world, where meaning is constructed purely in the mind, rather than found through engagement with shared, objective and external realities Leads to being stuck in your own head. Rumination. And eventually despair.

I think Bourdain's work presents an interesting and coherent set of questions and attitudes about modern life and meaning. There's a reason his work is so good! But, you have to consider his life as a whole.

Honest conversations about Hemingway's vision of masculinity and life cannot ignore the suicide.

You could perhaps pin his father's prior and brother's later suicides on the same memes, but his sister's and granddaughter's later suicides probably weren't because of a malformed conception of their masculinity. There might be some genetic mental health factors and/or suicide contagion here too.

Sure, you're correct, I don't think it's good to pin anyone's suicide on anything in particular. Suicide seems to be caused mostly by some kind of outside-factor separate from life-story, probably genetic in some way.

But if mental health factors impact the decision to commit suicide, then they impact the whole work of the person. Mental health isn't well-modeled as a debuff in a video game that comes in and changes them, especially when we're talking genetics.

"This is Water" has good practical value for organizing your thoughts against the tedious chore that is grocery shopping. It's worth reading for that reason, at least.

As far as its actual advice about taking control of your thoughts goes: it seems of dubious value for the average person (at least going off of myself and my own brain, where I strongly doubt I could successfully redirect my thinking processes intentionally in any direction over any long-lasting timescale).

However: you could argue that for the peculiar mind that is DFW (and perhaps others who go down that insane path that is becoming a writer), it might have helped him compared to the counterfactual where he didn't follow that advice, where maybe he would have otherwise killed himself sooner.

"This is Water" has good practical value for organizing your thoughts against the tedious chore that is grocery shopping. It's worth reading for that reason, at least.

Does it though? What does "good practical value" mean here? It seems to mean something like, don't be angry and hate other people or reduce them to nothing. But isn't the practical value of philosophy living a good life, and at some level a happy life? Is one's life happier if one tries to imagine the internal narratives that make everyone act like the way they do?

I'd contend that no, in many cases it doesn't. That the human brain and spirit cannot contend with this kind of massive self-abnegation. That pursuing this ideal to extremes leaves human nature nowhere to go. To quote the great philosopher Sennett

(Cognitive behavioral therapy enjoyer I just cut off in traffic) Think positively. He is probably in a rush for a reason. Maybe he’s late for a job interview. Maybe his wife is giving birth

Me: I’m da king of da highway

Sometimes the world is better when you just dismiss people as NPCs or Chuds or whatever.

For me, my outlet for this is team sports. Fuck Dallas. I can tell you rationalizations for why I hate the Cowboys (and the Redskins and the Falcons and the Patriots, who are ontologically evil, and the Rams...no one likes us we don't care). But I can recognize that they are just rationalizations and there is no substantive difference between me and a Cowboys fan, my joy in an Eagles' victory is not of a higher moral order or priority than his in a Cowboys victory in any utilitarian sense. But I root for the birds anyway, and wear my Dallas Sucks t shirt to the stadium and boo. Because it feels good, it's an outlet for the atavistic tribalism that the human mind craves. There are few activities I look forward to more than lifting weights after a devastating Dallas Cowboys loss, and listening to the seethe on post-game Cowboys podcasts, hearing the pain in the fans voices when Dak Prescott bottles it. That's my pressure valve.

Hugo had it right, purity must end with Inspector Javert or with the Archdeacon Claude Frollo.

In my view, Infinite Jest is maybe the last great work of the Western Canon of Literature, but it is also in many ways the world's longest suicide note. DFW tried to understand everyone and sympathize with everyone and overlook no one, and he couldn't live with it.

I do think that a philosopher ought righty to be judged by his death.

Should we judge a book purely by its final page, a song by its last verse?

By their nature philosophers are not happy people and are more likely to die by their own hand. Happy, fulfilled people do not go around looking for meaning in life, they've already found it. That doesn't mean that there isn't value for others in what they found while out searching. People are not all cast from the same mould, no "one-size fits all" method of finding happiness and meaning exists.

I think it's relevant to note that DFW hanged himself. Is that kind of radical empathy perhaps beautiful and perhaps true and perhaps admirable? Sure. But can you live with it? DFW couldn't, could he?

Also I just have to add that I find this a bizarre line of thought, imagining someone finding a man's hanging body, shaking their head sadly as they mutter to themselves "If only he'd berated more cashiers".

imagining someone finding a man's hanging body, shaking their head sadly as they mutter to themselves "If only he'd berated more cashiers".

"If only he'd been a little more selfish, a little less selfless, he would have been able to endure the world."

Talking about the suffering of cashiers brings to mind other words, though: thin skin.

Should we judge a book purely by its final page, a song by its last verse?

Point out where I said we should judge philosophers only by their deaths.

I admire both Bourdain's and DFW's works, and would say I admire their life philosophies and think there is something to be drawn from them. I would also say that it's relevant, if not dispositive, to consider how they died when considering their advice on how to live.

Also I just have to add that I find this a bizarre line of thought, imagining someone finding a man's hanging body, shaking their head sadly as they mutter to themselves "If only he'd berated more cashiers".

This is an exceedingly common line of thought that goes back to at least Victor Hugo, that of the man so obsessed with moral purity with no outlet for his human vices and desires, who eventually snaps and does something evil or self destructive. This is just applying the same standard we apply to a puritan Christian to a liberal icon.

I always thought about working in a kitchen as a post-made enough money leisure job. It’s hard work but seems more fun than a lot of jobs. Big issue would be the pace of cooking and probably gets repetitive like any job. But cooking is essentially a leisure job for the wealthy.

It’s hard work but seems more fun than a lot of jobs.

Both are true

Big issue would be the pace of cooking and probably gets repetitive like any job.

Yes, hours are fucked too. Also co-workers are fun but at the cost that many of them are dipshits or addicts (or both).

But cooking is essentially a leisure job for the wealthy.

This is wildly incorrect

I think it depends. Guy who made his fortune in tech or whatever and now wants a hobby restaurant where he doesn't much care if it bleeds money? Sure. Guy who wanted to be a chef since the age of sixteen, sweated in hotel kitchens and restaurants under star chefs, and is chasing that Michelin star or stars? Hell on earth, if I go by the stories of "when I worked for Marco Pierre etc." other chefs tell. Fallow, a highish-end London restaurant cooking channel on Youtube that I watch to see how the other half live, is a lot more fun and a lot more relaxed, but they also work damn hard (this is why you pay restaurant prices, nobody is going to do this at home). If you're driven, you have demons and the demons come screaming out.

Academia is the same way. All the vocational / ‘luxury’ careers are, I think.

What does the grim meathook reality in the third world refer to? By the way, great post, never thought about the food guys suicide like this.

Watch this from beginning to end and see if it isn't the ugliest damn place you've ever seen.

That felt bad, I had to skim to save my sanity. Meathook reality indeed.

By the way, why are there so many Japanese train enthusiasts (I assume?) watching these videos? Is it some kind of schadenfreude? Here I am sitting in my luxury class bullet train, thank goodness I don't live in the Congo?

The Congo is pretty much the exact diametrical opposite of Japan in a lot of ways!

Warning: The "?si=", "?pp=", and similar portions that YouTube has started adding to any URL created with the "share" button allegedly can be used to reveal the YouTube username of the user who created that URL. For that reason, those portions of the URL should be deleted before copying and pasting.

Eh, I don't care who knows I shared video of a Congolese rail journey.

As an aside: a million views in 4 days, with commenters all japanese train-enjoyers apparently, experiencing the call of the void here. Too interesting finding random pockets of youtube.

Notice the remnants of many other tracks alongside; apparently only the one is used nowadays.

The still-standing totally nonfunctional signals are a nice touch too.

This might be a good book form accompaniment

I actually have that on Kindle!

Bourdain, who grappled with drug addiction and depression, kills himself at 61 during a bout of unrequited love.

One missing, but important piece for judging B according to content of his character: when he killed himself, he left behind his 11 years old daughter.

Sorry, but when you have children, your life is no longer your own, that's the point of the whole enterprise. If your "twu wuw" is more important to you than your kid, you are, in technical terms, piece of shit.

Wow, I assumed B was childless. A self-proclaimed thief of restaurant supplies AND a deadbeat dad.

Dang, I hadn't realized she was 11.

This is the kind of post that scares people away from having children.

What do you live for man, if not for someone else? I mean there's always drugs, but you don't seem the sort.

What indeed.

My life ended 19 years ago; I simply lacked the courage to do the honorable thing.

If the idea of taking responsibility for another humans life and prioritising it above your own scares you, you probably shouldn't have children.

Sure, when you're a child you're subordinate to your parents and your teachers, then in college you're supposed to be subordinate to your instructors and subordinate yourself to the goal of finding work post college. Then when you're working you've still got to be subordinate to your bosses, but at least that's part time... then someone comes along and tells you you have to also subordinate yourself to your children. When do you get to be you? Never.

This attitude, despite being a 'conservative' one, seems to be new to the generations which grew up after WWII. Earlier generations did not maintain that the parents lived for the children.

No man is an island,

Entire of itself;

Every man is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less,

As well as if a promontory were:

As well as if a manor of thy friend's

Or of thine own were.

Any man's death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee.

— John Donne, "pre-WWII"

On the other hand, the idea that living for oneself is a bad thing is not new- the old style expression of it would have been that you lived for the community, and having children was part of meeting obligations to those around you.

A sort of primitive fascism, where everyone is basically a cell in the communal body. As E.O. Wilson said in a slightly different context, "Wrong Species".

No? Fascism is a specific thing. Obligations to the community is much much broader.

Only insofar as "fascism" has become a generic sneer-word for any philosophy that makes leisure class liberals uncomfortable.

Historical Fascists had a very clear and specific idea of what thier movement was about.

Yes, that's why I called it a "sort of primitive fascism" rather than actual fascism. Of course, sweep away the high-sounding language and everyone being expected to act as a cell in the body (or a cog in the wheel) isn't really such a good thing. And if you were to look at such a society, you'd probably find, as always, that there were a few people who were doing the directing of what the rest were doing.

Sweep away the high-sounding language about emancipation and radical individualism and what's left is a intellectual, moral, and biological dead-end.

You are alive, posting on this forum today because when you were small the people around you cared for you. They fed you, they clothed you, they taught you to read and write. If you really view this as "slavery" then perhapse they should not have done those things.

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Provided that they want to keep the option of suicide open, I presume?

Sometimes I think about what an alien sentiment this would be to someone from 150+ years ago. Children just happened, just like back pain and gray hairs. Except children laughed and learned, and you loved them.

I recognize this opinion is a dime a dozen here on this board where we all try to out-trad each other, but the older I get the more I think the Catholic doctrine might have this one right. The kind of sex that avoids the possibility of conception either sucks, or you've got your wife on a hormone regimen. The kind of sex required to conceive exactly when you want to conceive also sucks. It's joyless and mechanical. Slamming the switch on and off, from trying to avoiding to trying, feels like...I don't know...like putting a subtle but deep friction way deep down in your marriage.

In my marriage we disagreed on the timing of children. As a result we have some regrets that we resist lingering on, but I'm now convinced it probably shouldn't have been our choice to make. Who should want to accept the burden of a choice like that?

Uh…me?

I think conscious choices are one of the main dividers between us and other animals. If you’ve seen a feral cat colony, you’ve seen the unfettered id.

The kind of sex that avoids the possibility of conception either sucks, or you've got your wife on a hormone regimen.

Non hormonal IUDs exist, and so does cycle timing.

In my marriage we disagreed on the timing of children. As a result we have some regrets that we resist lingering on, but I'm now convinced it probably shouldn't have been our choice to make. Who should want to accept the burden of a choice like that?

Unless you want to have 7+ children, your options are:

  1. Contraception

  2. No sex

  3. Marry your wife shortly before menopause

In the first two cases you are still stuck with the burden of deciding when to have kids.

What’s wrong with having 7+ kids?

There's nothing "wrong" with it per se, but most people don't want to do it and historically speaking most people have never wanted to do it and have generally not done it in times and places of low infant mortality.

As a parent myself, Good.

If you find the idea of living for someone other than yourself problematic, you're probably going to end up being a shitty parent.

His suicide always struck me as so preventable.

Even before the last day/night’s series of simping text messages to Argento that sent her deeper into Icksville—with some more “toxically masculine” advice from a male friend or family member, he could have been disabused of the one-itis and still be alive, for example:

She’s a chest-tattooed single mother, a seasoned carousel rider, one for whom you’ve already bought out a 17 year-old boy to help protect her reputation. Her Wikipedia page contains both a “Sexual assault allegations by” and a “Sexual assault allegation against” section, like a soccer or hockey team has “Goals For” and “Goals Against” statistics. She’s not the one, bro. She’s not yours; it’s just your turn.

Unfortunately I doubt he had any toxic male bros.

Her Wikipedia page contains both a “Sexual assault allegations by” and a “Sexual assault allegation against” section, like a soccer or hockey team has “Goals For” and “Goals Against” statistics.

Now that you point that out, this must be pretty unusual. I wonder are there many other pages meeting that description. ChatGPT only reports Argento, Amanda Seales (whom I'd never heard of) and Stoya. I believe Armie Hammer claims to have been molested as a child.

This is the sort of thing you need search enabled for the answer to be correct. As it is more retrieval of niche facts, rather than reasoning.

I like the way even the free version of Claude starts by listing what sources it's looked at, while I wait for an answer. It conveys that it's researching something, unlike Free GPT, which answers instantly, and maybe there's a website embedded somewhere.

Amanda Seales (whom I'd never heard of) and Stoya

I just checked their Wikipedia pages. It seems ChatGPT is incorrect.

Even though Bourdain was the reluctant champion of wannabe vagabonds everywhere, I don't think this travel writer's Come to Jesus moment makes him a loser. It's no secret that he struggled mentally and his lifestyle offered a soothing escape, but after becoming close with a few bohemians over the years I think their brains are just wired different. There's less overthinking and more acting on impulse and desire. They are well traveled, and often end up spending large chunks of time in other places. They take on projects related to food or crafting much easier than I do, and they spend more time with people or pursuing their interests like thrifiting, gardening, or random stuff around the city. It seems to me that they are just following their natural inclinations.

It is of course, a double-edged sword. They aren't as financially stable, and with the risks they take and the analysis they forgo, they make mistakes, get burned, and suffer the consequences. But they are always experiencing and learning. They seem more grounded in lifestyle and conversation than your typical type-a desk-sitter. I'm currently trying to take some of their mentality into my own thinking so that I can expand my life experience.

It may be attractive to limit Bourdain to a mentally-ill escapist, and reduce his followers to misguided idealists who run from their problems and look down on the well-adjusted, but as always, the picture is much more nuanced than that. I'm starting to notice that a lot of online discourse is just p-hacking. Ideas are getting tortured down into their simplest form so that they can be packaged neatly and shipped to their loyal customers.

I'm disappointed, if not surprised, that it took 15 hours for this comment to appear. The blatant attempt at pathologising anyone who doesn't live a straight-and-narrow life is frustrating and I think inaccurate. There has always been a place in society for transients; in premodern times they would have been your merchants and traders and nomads, and the notion that nobody's psychology could be suited for that and it has to be motivated by some kind of deep spiritual brokenness is impressively provincial. Hell, Diogenes was a semi-revered figure in ancient Greece, and all the way on the other end of the world there was a prominent and respected hermit tradition in ancient China (which actually continues to this day), vagabondism has held sway for a long time.

I think there is a good point hidden somewhere in that post about the vaunting of alternative lifestyles that in practice won't be suitable for the majority of the population and the demonisation of lifestyles that do work for the majority of the population such as the supposedly "conformist" life so lambasted by the counterculture of the 70s (who were just reflexively in favour of anything hoe-scaring), and if the post had just made that argument I would consider that a fair enough point. But it loses the plot once OP tries to imply that nobody could ever be happy living transiently, using the case study of Anthony Bourdain as if it's necessarily the norm for people who do choose to live that way. It's very possible that some of the people who do so are trying to run from something, and it's also very possible that many of the people who do this just possess outlier levels of openness to experience and aren't "broken" in any meaningful sense except being weird. So much of the argument appears to almost be a definitional one - if you are not doing Normal Things then you are not normal and that indicates something wrong with you.

Also to add to the list of TheMotte cliches that this post appears to be attempting to speedrun through, there's that one obligatory throwaway line about the Third World. I have to say that my experiences in many third world countries in Asia have led me to conclude that much of the "third world" is badly miscategorised; it's a sloppy category error to lump them in with places mired in a horrific, almost Hobbesian state-of-nature, which I think represents a far smaller proportion of the world than most here appear to believe.

I'm starting to notice that a lot of online discourse is just p-hacking.

First time?

Do you think I'd piss on Ram Dass' grave too? Did I pick on Iggy Pop?

I pick on Bourdain because he's so widely celebrated and because I think it's misplaced. If you're going to be an advocate for the Hero's Journey, I require you to at least not die pathetically.

For what reason do you think Iggy Pop was putting on an act? I don't know much about him but it seems his punk self-identity was genuine.

All I know about Iggy Pop is that he brutally murdered the Pet Shop Boys before himself being brutally murdered by Vanilla Ice.

That's so old that it's mentioned in the Vesuvius scrolls.

The linked article doesn't quite imply it, more that he mellowed as he aged:

Personally, I always return to the Miami episode, which aired three years before Bourdain’s death, where he gets lunch with Iggy Pop.

In an interview about the episode, Bourdain says of Iggy: “His music was incredibly important to me from early on. Responsible for—in many ways—many of the things that went wrong in my life.”

But when he gets to Miami, Bourdain finds a healthy Pop. At lunch, they share one glass of white wine each. Iggy orders the shrimp.

You get the sense that Bourdain has come to this interview as a pilgrim comes to their guru on top of a mountain. The duo sits near a window with Venetian blinds. The sun is shining.

“As far as looking after my health,” Bourdain starts, grinning, “your music early on was a negative example.”

“I hear you,” Iggy Pop looks down and smiles.

“And looking at my own life and career, I’m pretty much known for traveling around the world and recklessly drinking and eating to excess.” He’s incredibly animated as he speaks. “What does it say about us that we are now sitting in a healthy restaurant—I just came from the gym—and we’re in Florida?”

Iggy Pop takes a minute to answer, like he’s been searching himself with this same question. But he’s not tortured about it. His eyes are clear and blue and he looks directly at Bourdain.

“Listen, if you just flame out, you’re in such voluminous and undistinguished company. And then all your works will flame out quicker with you.”

Eerily, the YouTube clip freezes at this moment. You never see Bourdain’s reaction to his hero’s proclamation.

But if you keep watching the episode, there are a few clues about how Bourdain may have felt.

As Iggy keeps talking about simple pleasures, Bourdain’s adam’s apple jumps. His eyes dart around as he asks his hero, “You’re the template for the rockstar. Other rock stars look to you to figure out ‘How should I behave?’ [...] Given that, what thrills you?”

Iggy smiles. “The nicest stuff right now, it’s really embarrassing,” he says, completely serene yet almost sheepish. “It’s being loved and actually appreciating the people that are giving that to me.”

And is it just me—or does Bourdain’s face fall?

Good catch! It’s when a person’s image of themselves shatters that they’re most susceptible to rumination and ideation.

I vigorously maintain that the poetic and glamorous reporting on Kate Spade’s suicide is what killed Bourdain: “She hanged herself with a scarf from her own fashion line,” said the news report on the car radio, and I literally yelled at the radio, “You fools! You’re causing a wave of suicides!”

I don’t think there’s anything on his death that could be said that hasn’t been. It is almost the least interesting of the famous celebrity suicides of that decade.

But I do think he wanted a grand exit. He wanted to show that bitch that broke his heart. This is what narcissists are wont to do. It’s why your piece of shit ex threatens to kill themselves when you break up with them. They won’t do it, probably, but it adds a grandiose element to their wallowing, to their pitiable state.

Some were always going to follow through. He wanted to show her, he wanted to make a woman he thought was uncaring (about him) suffer. You can’t do that in life. Complaining about an ex lover leaving you for a younger man isn’t really socially acceptable, even for women it makes you look pathetic and for men it’s worse. He obviously didn’t want to move on. The ego was bruised. Death seemed a final victory over her.

To be quite honest this is maximally uncharitable salacious conjecture about the motives of a dead man who can't defend himself. I was never some great fan of Anthony Bourdain, but to trash his suicide as a "narcissistic act" done out of spite in a thread where he is already being dogpiled is impressively distasteful.

I have a lot of sympathy for Bourdain. Like him, I’m a romantic at heart. Like him, I feel at home nowhere, really. He had a very nice PMC Jewish upbringing, his parents were a record label executive and an editor at the New York Times. He felt a certain emptiness his whole life.

So I don’t think I’m trashing him, or at least I don’t mean to. But I wanted to reply because I disagree with the post by @coffee_enjoyer cited above. I don’t think Bourdain killed himself because he was a hedonistic liberal boomer individualist. I know plenty of those who are very happy indeed. I think he killed himself because he became fixated on one woman and this is the most dangerous thing when one loves oneself or a certain image of oneself.

I often find myself nodding with your takes, but not this one. Mind you, I am one of those people who barely had heard Bourdain's name until he died, and have still never watched an episode of any of his shows nor really do I think I've ever heard his recorded voice, though I've read a good bit about him and I've seen his picture many times. Thus, perhaps you have more insight into him than I do if you were someone who followed his meanderings and respected his foodie-ness or whatever.

But from my perspective, as a man who has been rejected and burned many, many times (and the last I lingered on my image in the still forest pool I was not a narcissist) I never wanted to "show" anyone, even at my most desperate, not-quite-suicidal. As a kid I had the "if I got hit by a bus and died they'd really wish they had known me better" type thoughts, but not out of malice or one-upping. More straight self-pity feeling sorry for myself. And I don't know a lot of men who would off themselves to "get back at" someone.

You maybe be right that he did not want to move on (though I have no idea why, the Argento woman certainly does not seem magical in any way to me, but different strokes) but killing himself to spite her or earn a victory is not quite how I'd put it. More--"Now she knows how much I really cared about her." This may be a rephrasing of your point, but I think it's different enough to warrant mentioning.

Was just an act as a revealed preference, perhaps as the weight of it all caught up with him. But I think it would have ruined his image considerably if Iggy Pop's albums in 70s all included a little card that said "time traveler from the future confirms in 2026, Iggy Pop will be 79, still alive, living ascetically, vegan, no drugs, pursuing the simple pleasures where he values love and connection above all".

You either die an icon, or live long enough to become the Boomer.

There is little doubt that Iggy lived fast. Happily for him, he didn't die young.

It does not seem like he needs to live fast as an old person to avoid hypocrisy, nor do I think that someone not dying young means that they lived insufficiently fast while young.

Great post. I have my own thoughts about the specific catalyst that prompted Bourdain to kill himself. Pleased to see that @coffee_enjoyer seconded it in the linked post (before I changed my handle).

I've met some of these people who are addicted to "wanderlust", and they often seem rather unstable and unreliable. They remind me of a Reddit thread I once read about underrated red flags, and one comment said if a person often says "I used to have this friend..." (Good example, even if I felt a little personally attacked by it.) Or one of de la Rochefoucald's maxims (I'm paraphrasing): we get excited by making new friends because we feel we aren't sufficiently admired by our existing ones, and hope that our new friend will admire us as much as we feel we deserve. Living your life on the road is advantageous for dysfunctional people, as all the people you meet will only know you long enough to learn about your good qualities: you don't plan on sticking around long enough for them to find out that you're careless with money, short-tempered or have a bad relationship with your family. As Chuck Palahniuk would say, they're single-serving friends.

People who struggle with long-term intimate relationships instead opt for short flings and holiday romances, but it's a vicious circle, because the longer you spend behaving this way, the less practice you're getting at the skills you'll need for actual relationships. By the time you decide you're getting too old for this shit and want to form a real relationship and settle down with someone, you may find yourself wholly at a loss for how to comport yourself in this context. Habitual womanisers know exactly what to say to get a woman into bed within a few hours of meeting her, but don't have a clue how to express their affection for her in the context of an actual romance. This is equally true of platonic relationships: I bet Anthony Bourdain would seem effortlessly charming the first time you met him, but I imagine people who'd known him for years might say he was a bit of a shitty friend.

It's not unlike how socially awkward people find social situations stressful and emotionally taxing, so instead they retreat into video games and social media – but the longer they spend in those spaces instead of in the real world, the more stressful and emotionally taxing they find social situations in real life, causing them to retreat...

Why do you think Bourdain’s suicide had a specific catalyst? By all accounts he struggled with mental illness, lived a lifestyle that doesn’t exactly root people in their lives, and it could easily have just been his unlucky break; no doubt he’d been close to suicide before.

I don't think it's a coincidence that he killed himself just a few hours after an angry row with his girlfriend in which she admitted being unfaithful to him but dismissed his feelings about it. No doubt the lifetime of drink, drugs and mental illness didn't help, but I suspect this was the straw that broke the camel's back.

I didn't know Bourdain apart from his reputation as a chef, and let's face it, celebrity chefs are not role models for stable, happy lives.

But this seems to be rather harsh on the guy - "he's a sad loser"? Whatever his mental state or situation, he ended up killing himself. Let's not piss on the grave. You can criticise the globe-trotting lifestyle as much as you like, but we don't know the man's last moments.

I didn't know Bourdain apart from his reputation as a chef, and let's face it, celebrity chefs are not role models for stable, happy lives.

He's a role model in the progressive sphere for a lot of reasons. Honest blue collar work in a kitchen, diverse cuisine enjoyer, sneers at McDonald's, successful writer (the only way to get rich without exploitation under capitalism), had a show where he travels the world and advances the multi-cultural project.

All of these things are apparent virtues, but they weren't enough to save his life and maybe did him in instead. Maybe loser is the wrong word, but my claim is that the mental illness <-> lifestyle causal arrow might point both ways. What word would you use?

Have you ever seen anyone hold him up as such? Like, “I want to be like that,” or even “he had such an amazing life”?

Maybe this is generational, and I’m just not exposed to the Bourdain fan club, but it was easy for me to slot him into the tortured-aesthete archetype.

You frequently see his quotes on life thrown around as deepities, to the point that copypasta of them is a meme on twitter. Both Kitchen Confidential and No Reservations have a strong element of lifestyle-porn to them, imagine living that way like this fun interesting guy!

All the time. If I asked 10 of my progressive millenial friends to give me a list of 5 heroes who inspired them, at least 3 or 4 would include Bourdain. He occupies the same space as writers like David Foster Wallace

Man, that’s bizarre.

I don't see why. I'm not sure if you could rate his shows as 'insanely popular', but No Reservations ran for 9 season and 147 episodes, and it's spiritual successor, Parts Unknown, ran for twelve seasons and 104 episodes.

I don't know how that compares in the great scheme of things, but when you consider the two combined ran almost solid from 2005 to 2018, that's probably a longer career than some talk show hosts, nevermind all the other stuff he did. Hell, that's edging close to shows like Top Gear, and that show almost conquered the world.

Judge Judy ran from 1996 to 2021. I’m sure a lot of people approve of her…sass, or whatever. Does that qualify her as an inspiring hero?

I dunno, I’m sure someone would say it. But there’s definitely more than one kind of celebrity, and I didn’t realize Bourdain had that much admiration.

Read his books. He was heavily suicidal even while basking in the Kitchen confidential success. There are a lot of stories there.

He was extremely sad. For loser - it is not a good description. But how can you call a man that achieved tremendous success in things he didn't care about, and failed in everything he desired.

I think "seems to have it all" and then kills himself is a tragedy, as Tanista says. We never know, looking from the outside, what is going on inside.

If you read Kitchen Confidential - there is a restaurant mentioned next to his current where they go from time to time. You read the longing when he describes it - 3 stars, cause the owner don't care about fourth, the kitchen is quiet, professional, calm and not rowdy, they serve simple excellently prepared comfort food, and have great work life balance.

Not saying he didn't enjoy the frantic pace, but was obviously not fulfilled by it.

Happiness comes from within, not without. There is no amount of success or achievement or material wealth that will satisfy someone who is not able to accept himself.

But how can you call a man that achieved tremendous success in things he didn't care about, and failed in everything he desired.

A tragedy.

It's known that he killed himself mere hours after learning that Asia Argento, the woman he loved (and to whom he'd offered generous financial assistance by paying off the man threatening to sue Argento for sexually exploiting him when he was a young boy) was fucking someone else, and that she had so little respect for Bourdain that she didn't even bother being discreet about it. I don't know Bourdain, but it wouldn't surprise me if he thought of himself as a sad loser.

She sure seems to be a lot of trouble.

Say what you will about the lame conformity of marrying....

Have you tried it? I can well believe it's the way to go on net, but it's not like nobody has ever felt overpowered by quiet desperation on that path either.

Hey, I resemble that remark!

Also I'm skeptical about the one creampie every Saturday part.

The funny thing is it sounds pathetic in your teens but by middle age in a marriage you're doing well if you have sex once a week.

Which is why I'm skeptical of the notion that weekly creampie-included sex is the standard normie NPC suburban experience.

Imho, outside of a very rare few, the best way to get laid in your 40s is to have gotten married and grown old together in your 20s or 30s. In my 20s I had a fun string of girlfriends I had nonstop sex with. Including my future wife! But I can scarcely imagine that having kept up with aging, peers all settling down without me, career monopolizing more of my time, etc. Plus every time I creampie my 40 year old wife she still looks 25 to me. Beat that.

the best way to get laid in your 40s is to have gotten married

Sometimes, the sex will even be with one's wife!

career monopolizing more of my time, etc.

I've been wanting to downsize careers for a while now, but the loss aversion with regard to a smaller paycheck prevents me from doing so. When I was younger I thought (hoped?) that I as my net worth grew I'd be more down to fuck-around career-wise, but it has not happened.

When my wife and I were dating, we would have sex every single time we got together (which was about 3x per week). I was kind of excited when we got married, thinking that living together would mean we'd have sex perhaps even more, like 3-4x a week. Yeah no - I'm doing good if we have sex once per month. I'm not happy about it to be honest, but ultimately I do love her, and I also took a vow before God to stay by her side no matter what - there aren't take backs on that kind of thing. So I make do.

Also once kids enter the equation you'd kind of have to be a nonsensical psychopath to expect honeymoon period girlfriend frequency.

We bought a fairly small house for Americans when we first got together and the error of having our bedroom right next to the kid's bedrooms has not been more clear. Next house we are going to be floors apart.

A lot of women just won't have libido for a while after going through childbirth and infant caretaking, too. Which is perfectly reasonable considering the impacts involved.

I think the picket-fence life works better than the alternative for the vast majority of people, and that you should not gamble on being in the minority unless you have a very good reason to believe otherwise.

Christ I resemble this article. I do like the overall life lesson though.

You come at the King, you best not miss

You decide to have an MMF threesome with your wife you best not freak out when you see the other man's dick

If you're gonna be Napoleon, you best not be sick about it for six days

Generally: if you're going to claim the exemption, you best actually be exempt. One is not granted the exemption by merely claiming it.

Very probably true. I'd just rather not get too confident about the virtues of a life we haven't actually lived (if you're not one of the confirmed wife guys around here). Or maybe more precisely, even if it is the best life a guy could reasonably live, he might still expect to feel a certain amount of Bourdain-esque existential despair from time to time, if he's the sort of guy who's predisposed to feel that way. Wherever you go, there you are.

if you're not one of the confirmed wife guys around here

The purpose of the holiday I'm currently taking was to meet my future in-laws, so I suppose I am.

Not yet!

Good point. I'm feeling this one lately, though in terms socio-economic rather than romantic. Not that the romance is going all that well, mind you.

I've always been odd, first tried and failed to find an alternate way of life, then buckled down hard on trying to make it somewhat conventionally. And now, at the meridian of middle age, I suspect I'm meeting my limits. The conventional ways aren't working out. But there aren't any promising alternatives either.

I'll just let Comac McCarthy speak for me here.

Lost ye way in the dark, said the old man. He stirred the fire, standing slender tusks of bone up out of the ashes. The kid didn’t answer. The old man swung his head back and forth. The way of the transgressor is hard. God made this world, but he didn’t make it to suit everybody, did he?

I don’t believe he much had me in mind.

Aye, said the old man. But where does a man come by his notions. What world’s he seen that he liked better?

I can think of better places and better ways.

Can ye make it be?

No.

No. It’s a mystery. A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he don’t want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It ain’t the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it.

Are any of McCarthy's works translated into German? Just curious.

Apparently:

I hope not. I strongly doubt there's any translator who can do him justice. Frankly, I don't think it's possible at all. It's a piece of American literature written in English, and IMO needs to be read as such.

That said, of course there are. Translators were always desparate for work, and nowadays translations are practically free. Whether or not they live up to the original work - barely anyone ever bothers to think about it.

Literary translation, particularly for prestige authors like McCarthy, is not really "desperate for work" work. The money's not good, but you generally do it on a grant, so you have to plan the project and justify it and so on.

I'm feeling this one lately, though in terms socio-economic rather than romantic. Not that the romance is going all that well, mind you.

I understand why you feel the latter way. If you don't mind my asking, why do you feel the socioeconomic path you've taken isn't working out for you?

Chiefly, I suppose, because it involves interacting with humans, which I am not good enough at. I can muddle through with great effort, but I slip up too often and end up not being on the same page as my nominal peers. Not being aware of the same information as them, not sharing their implicit norms and expectations, and not pursuing the same goals as them, and thus communicating and cooperating poorly with them. Over time, this has compounding effects - alienating people, stalling career, running out of friends, failing to build up capital, dropping out of my starting socioeconomic class, which in turn makes it even more difficult to interact with people.

Even my supposedly very technical job is maybe 10% making machines do things, and 90% coordinating with others. The exact percentages may have varied depending on the company and position, but it's always been soft skills over hard skills. And my abilities as a programmer may be decent, maybe even above average, but certainly not good enough to compensate for my shortcomings in all other areas. Including my ability to learn to adapt, which isn't that hot.

So why do I feel that way? Because I'm just not much good at any area of life. I consistently make poor decisions and deliver poor performance, even when trying to adapt and improve. And it has always been that way.

But what alternate paths are there? I'm not creative or innovative or entrepreneurial enough to be the randian superman. I'm not cut out for the maverick rockstar influencer rebel life either, lacking the people skills required for it. Doing the hippie hermit self-sufficiency thing isn't viable either; I am ultimately a civilized, technology-dependent modern human with no agricultural skills and no land or capital with which to buy land. And the obvious route of becoming unemployed and living off of social welfare (which the current federal government intends to reduce, anyways) outright disgusts me; if I fail my fellow humans, then let me at least not be a burden. Then there's the option of just taking a menial job like delivery driver - but I can't realistically make do with a significantly reduced salary; I do have a family depending on me, and costs of living are high. There's not enough slack.

So muddle through I will, on and on.

A lot of the more eccentric socioeconomic paths fizzle as you get older. The old careers have dealt with the problem of people aging up, if even their solutions aren’t always well-suited to the modern world. It’s recognised that there are a bunch of 50/60 year old bankers around who aren’t hotshots and people have some idea what to do with them.

If you do something newer and weirder, like NFT transaction consultancy, then when NFTs fall out of fashion you have to pull a new career together for yourself while all the traditional ones are already full of the people working their way up the old fashioned way.

To a certain degree your NFT transaction consultancy kind of character will survive by just skimming the waves of whatever becomes new and hip. Obviously lots will blow up in the attempt but I know enough crackhead energy crypto types who manage to skid along on occasional lottery hits

Because he's living in Germany, I assume.

Partially, but not mainly. Mainly it's just me. Germany is making it more difficult for me in some ways because

  • Costs of living are high, as is the tax burden, and I can't just make do with less,
  • Germany may offer generous welfare for comitted parasites, but I refuse to take it,
  • Germans place great value in people's ability to conform to implicit and high expectations, which I am decidedly not good at,
  • It's very hard to become self-sufficient, the market and the law don't really support it, and
  • Even relatively technical jobs are, to a large degree, about conforming to buerocratic and social norms.

But again, plenty of people deal just fine with all that, and prosper.

Man, they really trained the LLMs on that coffee_enjoyer post.

Interesting that your experiences diverge so much from mine. If you ask me, travel slutting is a totally different experience if you're a man and also not a celebrity, in that you actually have to plan everything and pay for things yourself (I'll be honest, I did once have my debit card stop working in Antwerp and had to pull an Italian girl to get dinner and a bed). Self-reliant backpacking, in my experience, teaches you the exact opposite skillset and vibe, an upbeat cynicism that always ends in a yearning for the familiar bed back home. Things change a lot when you introduce enough drugs, though. At a certain point, you start thinking "wouldn't it be nice if I had the resources for me and my best friends to get a beautiful rental, spend a weekend rocketing through the psychosphere, and then go home to routine - so, how do I make this happen".

As a wise man once said: when you get the message, put down the phone.

In my imo I feel like it's pretty clear that his lifestyle is a result of his mental state and not the other way around. Doing that shit won't make you mentally ill, but most of the people doing that had mental illness before they started.

In my imo

In my in my opinion?

In his Japanese sweet potato

Yo dawg I heard you like my opinions

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