I love Infinite Jest. One of its most powerful lectures comes from a father — not unlike Polonius’ speech in Hamlet — delivering a wish that the addressed choose a better, wiser path in life: one that avoids merely acting in the scenery of life, for living it. In short, the listener and the reader are asked to avoid being figurants.

…you can’t appreciate the dramatic pathos of a figurant until you realize how completely trapped and encaged he is in his mute peripheral status… because [if he] decided he couldn’t take it any more and stood up and started shouting and gesturing around wildly in a bid for attention and nonperipheral status… the whole rest of that episode of ‘Cheers!’ would be about jokes about the name star’s life-saving heroics…

But this advice’s relevance has only become more poignant amid the anhedonic, AI-windswept existence of the modern moment.

weekday afternoon, experiencing myself as a kind of online shadow, a thing of fidgets, a half-being hollowed out by roaming spectral appetites—for destruction, for gratification, for the email that never comes—it occurs to me to ask: Now, which of the seven deadly sins is this?

Anger’s in there somewhere, sure, a kind of generalized psychic road rage, but not enough of it to qualify. Same with envy, pride, gluttony, lust—just floating shards. Avarice? Nah. Of the seven, sloth probably comes closest, that enigmatic void state known to the early Christians as “acedia.” But not even acedia, bottomless as it is, can quite comprehend this plugged-in groundlessness, this ether-sweeping emptiness, this interstellar elongation of the spirit. Sin, the theologians tell us, is whatever separates us from God. Whatever blocks the beams of divine love. And at 3:23 p.m. in Caffè Nero, I am all but unreachable by heavenly radiation; I can feel it wavering, honey-colored, at the fringes of my soul. So have we done it at last—you, me, the kids? Have we invented an eighth deadly sin?

— James Parker, “The Eighth Deadly Sin,” The Atlantic

Reading Parker’s prose, I immediately recognized the two as speaking to the same feeling. And heck, it’s the same terminal, bourgeois boredom in the face of the rule of the Last Men as described in “Five Years” from “Ziggy Stardust.”

The New York City subway map is so iconic you can build an identity around it. You’ve seen it, or its 1979 redesign by Michael Hertz, printed on coffee mugs and t-shirts and chico bags.

After twenty years of dedicated tmux use, I listened to my younger colleague and tried zellij: a screen multiplexer written in the hot new language Rust.

After 3 months of use, I am going back to tmux.

Pros:

• On-screen menus make key bindings far more discoverable than tmux’s man page ever did
• Mouse support (but this is actually a con for me)

Cons:

• Its key-combo design clashes with the command-line tools I use daily (although it is fixable by drafting a custom config)
• Mouse support
• Sine qua non It doesn’t have a stack of named copy buffers