kull the conqueror
the gumption to fight the consumption presumption
I collect things.
As a kid, like most boys, it was G.I. Joe, LEGO, baseball - and, yes, Magic the Gathering1 - cards. I collected MP3 files in high school and college, CDs in the early aughts, and now vinyl records. I’ve got not one but two tsundoku next to the IKEA POÄNG chair in my office, typically adding three books to the pile for every two I read. To be fair, the books once read find homes elsewhere. My collection no longer grows at a pace that gives my wife a valid reason for divorce. She nevertheless collects many invalid reasons to divorce me, but that’s for another newsletter.
I collect the past. After buying an old portable tape player2 at a thrift shop - a place where other collectors gave up their ghosts - I recently dug out my Connecticut Youth Jazz tapes from the early ‘90s. They still work. The CD-Rs with the now vintage MP3 files still provide the tinny notes of Napster and a lingering Limewire terroir when put into my Subaru Outback.
I also collect the present. I check my WHOOP data every morning to understand how hard I should push my workout that day. Within my growing collection of bullet journals - eleven so far - I started noting my daily intention for the day. I usually wake up, meditate, and put a single word, an action, as my compass for the day. I’ve missed many days during the process. But this is not about the collection of perfection.
This is about a word that continues to find its way into the parentheses next to the date in my weekly Bullet Journal spread: (Cull).
It’s an interesting word as its two primary definitions are similar, yet evoke very different feelings. Its origin, Latin: colligere (to gather), which became collier in Old French and then merged with collect in English becoming cull in Middle English. This gathering and collecting connotes the more positive definition as cull can mean to “select from a large quantity; obtain from a variety of sources.” Synonyms include: glean, choose, get. It brings to mind picking those chosen few from the pack as in our nation’s motto e pluribus unum: out of many, one. It implies the things you keep; the wheat from the chafe.
Cull also means “reduce the population of (a wild animal) by selective slaughter.” Synonyms include: kill, destroy, thin out the population of. It brings to mind the culling of deer and wolves to reduce their populations, the irony that the latter could cull the former. It’s the remaining remnants, not the worthwhile whole. It implies the things you discard; the chafe from the wheat.
The word also appears to be the inspiration for the titular character of what was a very poorly reviewed movie from 1997 starring Kevin Sorbo, Kull the Conqueror, which was originally slated to be the third Conan movie, but Herr Schwarzenegger did not want to play the part causing them to change the name and reduce the talent.
Since we started tracking word use in 1500, cull peaked in the 1560s, 1616, 1784, and again from 1923-1950. While I did not look into why these were times of cull’s crests (though such an endeavor c/would be interesting), I surmise we use it less today than we have since the late 1500s because of where I started today’s piece.
I’m certainly not the only one guilty of collecting. Look around your home. Look at your phone. How many things do you see that you either don’t a) need or b) really even want? How many apps - while usually free - take up space in your pocket to make your life slightly easier while simultaneously making it impossible to truly be present?
We collect wine and call ourselves connoisseurs. We collect high-end music equipment and call ourselves audiophiles. We collect endless kitchen gadgets - Air Fryers, Rice Cookers, Ninjas, Magic Bullets, coffee makers and grinders, cast-iron cookware - and call ourselves chefs and baristas. We collect Air Jordans, concert tees and sports memorabilia and call ourselves fans. We collect cars, watches, whiskeys, cigars, guns, pint glasses, tools, hats and call ourselves men.
Our doorsteps collect packages from Amazon containing copycat products we don’t require that aren’t built to last even if we needed them to do so. In America, one out of eleven of us keep our stuff in one of 23 million units across 52,000 storage facilities. That’s more than the number of Starbucks, McDonalds, Dunkin Donuts, Pizza Huts and Wendy’s combined.
We collect ourselves in queues at the Apple Store for the iPhone 15 Pro Max despite the previous one still working fine and the current version costing one hundred dollars more than a new MacBook Air.
We collect content. Endless, yet somehow stagnant, streams on NetFlix/Hulu/Apple TV/Paramount+/Peacock/ESPN+/Disney+ collect hours of our time leaving a thin film across our glazed eyes. The infinite scroll of social media feeds leave us hungry twenty minutes later like Chinese3 food. We collect podcast queues to play while we clean those kitchen gadgets.
We collect points for making reservations on Open Table, when we fly Delta, when we purchase those Air Jordans on our Discover card, and Dunkin’ Rewards when we buy their Pumpkin Swirl along with its 185 grams of sugar. One could alternatively collect its 46 sugar packets instead.
And it’s not just things we collect.
We collect debt - not a surprise given the collections supra.4 As it stands right now, Americans hold $1,031,000,000,000 of credit card debt. We collect more debt as we age: those under 35 have $3,700 while those over 75 have $8,100. And every year, over 150,000 of those aforementioned storage units are sold off for non-payment.
We collect experiences. Normally, I could get on board with this. And yet. They aren’t really experiences unless we take hundreds of pictures on that fucking phone - pictures that we’ll rarely5 go back to view. Or we have to post it to some social media dumpster fire to collect likes and comments from our friends. Regrettably, we almost never see those friends - but that’s also for another newsletter. We neglect to collect the experiences we’ll recollect without the aid of tech.
Which brings us to the worst offender: Big Tech with their data practices and their cookies collecting data to cash in on their greatest product (us). But this isn’t a diatribe about that. That’s also for another newsletter and will come with a tin foil hat and sand for my fellow Ned Ludds to throw in the machine’s gears.
Fuck, this is turning into an article fit for the Atlantic. Not because it’s good, nor because it qualifies as journalism: it’s just so damned depressing. Let’s move on.
We do too much collecting; we need more culling. While we no longer call collect6 - though somehow this service still exists - we should cull collecting. Or, further to the point, as my dad would say: it’s time to cut the crap.
My first cull was turning off my subscription to the Economist. I’ve written about how I can’t stop a book until I’ve finished it despite clear permission to do so after 30 pages. From 2006 until 2016, my brain collected just about every single word in every single issue. Reading the Economist every week was my way of being7 informed on mass transit and at coffee shops. Its content an albatross around my neck8 to bear before the next issue arrived on my doorstep. It was too much.
When I stopped my subscription, their “please don’t go” emails offered a digital version for a fraction of the price. Tempting. No, if anything, that was worse as it would further tie me to this fucking thing in my pants.9 There’s something about reading the Economist earnestly on one’s phone looking exactly the same as someone scrolling through TikTok mindlessly.
The second cull was doing my best to withdraw from the algorithms. I am vociferously opposed to social media. I took a long time to set up a Facebook account and left it around the time my second daughter was born. That was almost nine years ago. I don’t miss it at all. Like REI on Black Friday, I chose to Opt Out of the algorithm.
The third cull was removing all unnecessary notifications from my phone. And since all notifications other than phone calls are unnecessary, I have zero notifications since no one calls anymore. Have I missed things as result? Certainly. Can I remember any single missed connection as something that was vital to that day, that week, that month or my life? Nope.
My current cull involves spending a little bit of time every day unsubscribing to things like emails,10 periodicals, services and podcasts. There are 450,000 active Apple podcasts. On average, a new podcast episode is released every 3 to 7 days. Assuming one new episode a week, that’s more than 64,000 podcast episodes being released every day. Now that’s a lot of middle-aged men with too much free time on their hands.
Speaking of middle-aged men, the mindfulness app, Waking Up, by fellow atheist Sam Harris, was something I thought I could get into. Re-reading that sentence makes me cringe. As did writing that last word. I digress. I’ll concede the app itself helped set a strong technical foundation. But honestly, why on god’s green earth would I want to have a notification on my phone throughout the day telling me to be mindful as it asks me every time I open the app? I’ve turned off auto-renew, so after my subscription’s up (we already knew I was cheap and always get my money’s worth), I’ll do my meditating the old fashioned way.
My delivery subscription to the New York Times11 has ebbed and flowed like the tide as my tolerance for content has waxed and waned like the moon. Ditto my Outside+ subscription to give me the opportunity to go outside. I sunset my subscription to Sunset.
One last point about subscriptions. It seems fitting that a potential portmanteau - a potmanteau or potenteau, if you will - of content and subscription is conscription. This word is already used for compulsory state service. Instead of a voluntary decision, I, like the conscripts of wars past, felt like I had no choice but to fulfill my duty and read everything that I subscribed to - somewhat against my will.
And in a too-perfect-it-had-to-be-contrived coincidence, when asked to use it in a sentence, Oxford Languages Dictionary gets it right when it says “conscription was extended to married men”.
I’ve realized that what used to excite me - podcasts, watching sports, politics, following the latest show, reading the newspaper, doing the Wordle - no longer bring it. I’m not the type of person who can listen to a podcast while doing something else and retain anything (interestingly, I can read while there is music playing). With sports, I got to the point where I realized I was older than just about every player, and now find watching sports much less a driver of happiness as playing sports or exercising.
Ironically, in between this week’s newsletter’s writing volleys and service at work, I came across a quote from John McPhee while reading his Levels of the Game, describing one U.S. Open tennis match from 1968 - not even the final - between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner.
Dispassionately, he culled the unserious and the relatively unsuccessful.It referenced Arthur Ashe’s coach and his approach to separating the chafe from the wheat. But it serves as an apt metaphor, albeit a bit Baader-Meinhofesque, for what I’ve realized I’ve been doing these past years.
Some may say the answer is to find a happy medium between collecting and culling and curate instead. Perhaps. Some could also say I’m suffering from anhedonia, a typical sign of depression. But not everything needs to be medicalized.
It could just be that I’m finally finding happiness in other places. In spending a rainy afternoon building a LEGO Optimus Prime while my daughter crochets a hat for her growing stuffed animal collection12 next to me while watching Halloween movies. In reading (yet another) book - fiction this time. In taking a little longer at my daughter’s back-to-school picnic to spend time with other mums and dads. In creating the words you’re reading now.
I had the opportunity to head into the city for a few days recently. A colleague posited that Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models are going to have as big of an impact on the world as the iPhone. Embracing my already established Luddite tendencies, I countered that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good thing.13
On the train back home, I noticed everyone on their phones. I was alone in my staring at everyone else staring at their phones. Scrolling, swiping, scouring the “breaking news”, watching the latest episode of whatever counts as “peak TV” these days that you’re forced to view all at once so you de-risk your chance for inadvertent spoilers. I couldn’t help feeling sadder than I already was.
And that’s why I bought a dumb phone.14
The writer claims no shame in his game. Of cards.
Included inside was a tape with what I believe was someone’s manifesto. This post, as you’ll find, becomes a bit of one itself.
I’ll leave the TikTok connection for you to make here in the footnotes.
Never.
Looking.
In high school, I worked for hours on a poetry assignment where we had to write an additional section to Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I got a D. But I’m writing anyway. Take that, Mr. Dudley.
The one that’s about five inches long. And has a screen.
Please don’t follow this advice with this email.
And no, I don’t want a digital version, thanks.
Apples and trees.
Interestingly, we both agree that social media are garbage.
I didn’t. But I’m this close (thanks to Ivor and the fellas for compiling that helpful list).