They Are Babies

there is no "rest of the painting"

A lot of people in my life had babies in the last few years. It’s a nice thing: The babies are all very cute. These babies can’t do much for themselves, so they lead, for a time, as frictionless a life as is possible: All they have to do is cry, and someone will figure out what they need and take care of it. Diaper change, feeding, getting some gas out of your abdomen—a human adult will do it for them.

This frictionless life is not sustainable in the long term. The baby grows, and their brain begins to solve problems like “I am on my back but want to be on my belly” and “I don’t want to be in this crib anymore.” Friction enables their muscles to grow, to hold their head up against gravity and to stand using their own legs. A parent being out of reach induces the baby to make an effort on their own to get to mama or dada. Social friction will teach them how to behave in the world, for good and ill.

But for a long while yet, a child will simply have no concept of limitations. Children’s imaginations are so wondrous because anything is possible, to them. Growing up is a process of narrowing, of limitations asserting themselves. Friction, both physical and metaphysical, becomes great enough to stop—ideas, language, physical movement, and, in the end, life itself. The central tension in our lives is that the friction that makes us what we are will also kill us.

It is from this tension the artistic impulse is born, and from which it is bound. Limitations are essential to art—the moment we decide to share what exists only in our mind, we invite in a million different sources of friction, a million different limitations. How do you express your idea in the first place? What words does your language have or not have that make it difficult to convey exactly what you mean? For visual media, how do you use the frame to capture what you want the audience to see? Mundane technological challenges, random production snafus, actor or session musician or material availability, these limitations fundamentally affect the art we put out into the world and experience.

All of these choices and reactions are what make art art. It is through art that we can embrace that central tension of our lives, the idea that growth can only come through limitation. There must be an end to all things, whether that end is the edges of a canvas or a television show being canceled.

The march of technology and the ouroboros of late-stage capitalism have given us a new type of Guy (gender-neutral, but mostly men): people with enough money to think they matter, and who think technology is the answer to all their problems. These problems are not real problems, not as most of us experience them; they are the myriad forms that friction can take in our daily lives. Having to go to run errands, having your favorite TV show end (planned or not), feeling as though we’re only seeing part of the Mona Lisa.

What we see in this type of Guy is the mindset that they should never have to experience discomfort or displeasure, and the money to make that happen. “Money is an iron,” as the character Chung Sook observes in Parasite. It flattens, it removes wrinkles, it reduces friction. With enough money, you can fly anywhere you like, whenever you like. Your clothes can fit better. Your food will be better. You can hire people to cater to your every whim. This is why the obscenely wealthy tend to be, at their core, fucking babies.

It’s not only the obscenely wealthy. In David Foster Wallace’s infamous A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (sorry), Wallace describes the constant pampering and lack of friction aboard a 7-night luxury cruise as ultimately despair-inducing, postulating that the “Dissatisfied Infant” part of himself can only grow more so, never less.

I want to believe that maybe this Ultimate Fantasy Vacation will be enough pampering, that this time the luxury and pleasure will be so completely and faultlessly administered that my Infantile part will be sated.

But the Infantile part of me is insatiable—in fact its whole essence or dasein or whatever lies in its a priori insatiability. In response to any environment of extraordinary gratification and pampering, the Insatiable Infant part of me will simply adjust its desires upward until it once again levels out at its homeostasis of terrible dissatisfaction.

Wallace ascribes this Dissatisfied Infant to Americans specifically, though I don’t doubt that this instinct resides in people of just about every culture on earth. The Dissatisfied Infant is not merely part of this new type of Guy, though. It subsumes them. From Elon Musk simps on Twitter to youth vampires like Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg, the life they envision is akin to gliding smoothly through space, trajectory unaltered, forever. Newton’s First Law made manifest. There are no limits, there is no end.

This is the essence of immortality: to continue in life, untouched by the forces of decay, the friction that kills us nucelotide by nucleotide. And yet it is also the death of change, growth, art; immortality is most often portrayed as a curse for this reason.

There is no art without limits. There is no life without friction. Fuck these stupid babies.