Umm… Now What?

Sometimes I hang around this dock even if I’m not catching the ferry to Manhattan.

JERSEY CITY, JULY 20, 2025.  I wake up, make coffee, stretch out on the couch, open my journal, write, “Umm… now what?”

Then I ruminate over what the question implies. I hesitate to spell the implications out, because I might come across as the lazy, lucky guy I am. But I hate wasting rumination, so here goes.

I’m two thirds of the way through a four-month vacation from teaching. I’m not gloating, just informing. Well, maybe gloating a little. Today’s biggest challenge is deciding what to do.

I have daily rituals to perform. Consume coffee, yogurt/granola/banana breakfast. Brush teeth, run along Hudson. Do jumping jacks, sit-ups. Swill electrolytes. Shower. These tasks leave me with plenty of free time. Free time!

My little red appointment book, in its entry for today, lists a single hand-written item: “med.” At 1 pm I have a weekly meditation session via zoom with my pal and meditation teacher Lindsey.

Meditating with Lindsey is a pleasure, not a chore. Who knows, maybe this session will take me a step toward the terminally chill state called enlightenment. I don’t believe in enlightenment, but you never know.

Meditation lasts only 30 minutes. In search of something else to occupy me, I flip open my laptop and scan the desktop, the files and folders for quantum mechanics, psychedelics, artificial intelligence, art, consciousness, psychiatry, war and so on, things I yammer about here on “Cross-Check.” Other files and folders concern money, health, school, family issues. Practical stuff.

My desktop encapsulates my personal paradigm, the obsessions, duties, beliefs, values that lend my life structure and purpose. You need a paradigm to navigate the world, make sense of it. But every paradigm comes with opportunity costs, it precludes seeing things from other perspectives.

I’ll never know what it’s like to be a Namibian topologist, a Russian midwife. (Hey, I just thought of a killer AI app: create virtual realities that help us imagine what it’s like to be a different person or even different species. What is it like to be a right whale giving birth? A gay, bodybuilding, Trump-worshiping fireman living on Staten Island? )

My point is that my paradigm bounds my choices in ways of which I might be unaware. I’m also constrained by the limits of my body and mind. I can’t jump off my balcony and fly after that seagull arcing over the Hudson. I can’t play grandmaster chess or untangle 10-dimensional knots.

But I don’t care what Doug Hofstadter and Robert Sapolsky say, I have free will. Unlike Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich, I possess what Isaiah Berlin calls negative liberty in abundance. No one is making me do anything today.

I have plenty of positive liberty too. I can write a follow-up to my recent column about cancer screening, which wasn’t as persuasive as I hoped. I could start another Solzhenitsyn novel, since Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich felt like an appetizer.

I could commemorate the 80th birthday of nuclear weapons by calling for the abolition of nukes and war in general. I could bash Trump, whose actions are spurring a global arms race. But why bother, when folks with far more clout are already bashing him?

I could embrace my inner nihilist and binge the next season of Blacklist. (I was thrilled when the series finally bumped off Elizabeth, but now, inexplicably, I miss her.)

I could do nothing today. Nothing. Nothing at all.

Except I’m never doing nothing. My body stays busy, even if “I” am trying to chill. My heart beats, stomach digests, lungs inhale and exhale. My brain spews out thoughts. These functions persist even when I’m sleeping! Another constraint, I suppose.

What would I do if I were enlightened? Probably sit here on the couch and watch ferries go back and forth from Hoboken to Manhattan. Back and forth. I’d listen to sparrows bickering and leaf-blowers snarling beyond my window.

I’m too restless, and plagued by liberal guilt, to be that chill. I brood over all the souls who lack liberty, negative or positive. They’re dodging drone strikes in Gaza, ICE agents in LA. They’re working two shitty minimum-wage jobs to feed and house their kids. Shouldn’t I do something to help these un-free folk?

Here’s the riddle I’ve been circling: What’s the point of life? This old conundrum becomes especially pressing if your basic needs are satisfied, as mine are. You have more than adequate food, shelter, companionship. Not to mention a microwave oven, hi-def TV and internet hookup.

Do you pursue pleasure? Or do you heed the nagging of your conscience to do something “good”? To help those less lucky than you? What if there’s nothing you can do to help others? Or what if—bear with me a moment--everyone else is as fortunate as you?

Let’s say we attain a utopia, a world in which everyone’s basic needs are met. Yeah, hard to imagine now. But this thought experiment lets us contemplate the question: What would we do if we could do anything?

I once thought we’d try to solve the mystery of our existence--through science, philosophy, art, whatever. This, to me, is the noblest, most profound of all human endeavors, even though I doubt there’s a final answer: We’re here to figure out why we’re here, endlessly.

Unfortunately, many people disagree with me on how we should spend our free time. In his new book More Everything Forever, astrophysicist-turned-journalist Adam Becker scrutinizes the fantasies of tech bros like Sam Altman, Marc Andreesen, Jeff Bezos, Ray Kurzweil, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel.

These mega-capitalists don’t see existence as a mystery to be solved. They see it as a contest to be won. They don’t give a shit about truth, they only care about power. And they’ve got power now.

Fuck those jerks.

I glance over what I’ve scribbled in my journal in response to “Umm… now what?” I know what to do now. First I’ll finish this column about how I’m not sure what to do. My half-assed meta-solution to every dilemma: write about it.

Then I’ll head outside with my sketch pad and find something to draw. Yesterday, I watched a big machine pound a steel girder into the parking lot of the Hoboken terminal. Yeah, that monster would be fun to draw.

Come on, isn’t this thing cool?

Further Reading:

The main way I spend my free time is writing columns for my free online journal, “Cross-Check.” You can find a list of all my columns here.

Comment from my friend James McClellan, historian of science:

I can easily answer your deep questions:

a) Life has no point, aside from reproduction. You’ve done that successfully, so your role in life has been fulfilled. For the rest, chill!

b) We are completely accidental creatures. Had that asteroid missed the Earth 66 million years ago, we wouldn’t be here and neither would our existential agonizing. You know this.

c) Our individual lives are mere puffs. They make the day of a mayfly a comparative eternity. I say this as a result of my recent comparison of myself to the size of a quark (and the corollary of the length of my lifetime to that of the universe so far). Then, too, as my end rises over the horizon, I look back and think how busy and engaged I was, but now only to see all that as just a fleeting moment.

d) I had a discussion the other day about the virtues of being an obstetrician; my interlocutor mentioned bringing a new soul into the world, and I suddenly said to myself: the soul is a myth.