Saturday roundup

Essays I've recently come across that strike me as having appeal to Precipice readers

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I’ll start with one of those book reviews that holds its own as an essay, in addition to assessing the book in question fairly.

Longtime Precipice readers have encountered my thoughts on contemporary Christian music, as in this example. But my questions about how the whole impetus got started have lingered.

This morning I encountered a review of God Gave Rock and Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music by Leah Payne at the Los Angeles Review of Books. The review is by Tom Zoellner. The title is “What Would Becky Buy?”, and it’s illuminating indeed.

Zoellner starts with a look at the life-and-work trajectory of Rich Mullins:

IT WOULD HAVE BEEN nearly impossible to have attended an evangelical megachurch in the 1990s without hearing “Awesome God,” a bright and sure-minded worship song that tore its way through sanctuary loudspeakers nationwide and made its lyricist, Rich Mullins, a famous man in Christian subculture.

But Mullins did not fit easily into the suburban family-oriented box of what was expected of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) stars. He instead lived his life like a wandering St. Jerome, giving most of his money away and avoiding the merchandising and touring expected of him. He even criticized the shallow theology of evangelicalism and the low quality of his own pat megahymn.

At the height of his fame, he moved to Tse Bonito, a small village on the New Mexico side of the Navajo Nation, to become a secondary school music teacher. He hid a drinking problem, and some suspected him of being gay. After he died in a 1997 traffic accident, one music executive disparaged him as a “a weirdo with one good song.” But another observed that he “probably understood grace better than all of us in the entire Christian thing.”

Mullins was emblematic of CCM’s essence:

Mullins’s life is only one example of the tensions that lay underneath the genre of CCM, the multibillion-dollar business that preached a gospel of renouncing the world while embracing the same glitter-and-hype tools as the secular music world, packaging a message of nails, pain, and blood into a digestible vanilla bonbon.

CCM’s business model also rested on the same foundations as its secular counterpart—concerts, megastars, albums, and retail stores—and its demise at the hands of the internet created a similar fragmentation and rethinking of the art form itself. The music that backgrounded so much of megachurch culture in the last half century may well have been a mere pinprick on the 2,000-year longue durée of Christian music, an artifact of the late American Cold War period much as the Gregorian chant or the antiphon were the faith-based crazes of their own times.

Then Zoellner summarizes Payne’s historical tracing of how the phenomenon came to be:

The genre’s complicated arc comes under detailed scrutiny in the valuable history God Gave Rock and Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music (2024) by Leah Payne, a Pentecostal pastor’s kid who grew up on this music in rural Oregon, married an aspiring Christian musician, and moved to Nashville to help him pursue his career. She now takes a more clinical view as a professor of religious history at Portland Seminary in Oregon. In one of the very few academic—and autobiographical—phrases in this admirable book, she says she “came to see CCM concerts as sites where power is created and negotiated.”

Payne argues that uplifting and commercially successful songs like “Awesome God” helped evangelical churches fine-tune the message and the rhetorical key that would attract new members, creating a feedback loop of sorts. As she writes, “[T]he charts displayed what sorts of ideas about God, the world, and the people of God were bankable evangelical theologies.” The reliably cheerful soundtrack may have swelled the Sunday attendance numbers and reinforced a white suburban wholesomeness, but it ultimately left little room for the outcasts and holy fools like Rich Mullins who make up some of the truly prophetic figures in Christian history. The music’s stale conformity created a kind of bondage, the inverse of the ecstatic freedom that the lyrics promised.

Payne traces the roots of CCM to the altar calls, low liturgy, and shouting of the revival meetings and Holiness movements of the early 20th century, which led to the 1902 founding of the influential Pentecostal Union Mission Publishing Company in Nashville, Tennessee. Their songbooks popularized tunes like “Were You There?” that spoke of a particularly American brand of Muscular Christianity standing in the way of modernity.

Yet it had no problem employing the tools of modernity to spread the message. Radio preachers—–like Aimee Semple McPherson, broadcasting the Foursquare Gospel on Los Angeles’s KFSG, and Charles Fuller, whose syndicated Old Fashioned Revival Hour broadcast to 650 stations on the ABC network—spread a homogenized message that helped merge Pentecostal worship’s déclassé style with the liberation-flavored songs of the Black church and wrap it all in the kerygma of the First Baptist Church on the corner that emphasized probity and patriotism. Billy Graham’s Hour of Decision interspersed preaching with hand-over-heart songs like “God Bless America.”

The devil’s timpani of rock and roll that emerged in the 1950s, “with its songs of teenage love, fast cars, and ‘social dancing,’ was almost universally condemned in evangelical circles as ‘a menace to Christendom,’” writes Payne, even though its own origin in the thumping rhythm of the blues could be found in the music of the Black church and in the wail of Holiness revivals. “The same music we worship by, pray by, weep by, believe and rejoice by […] is being used by Dixieland jazz bands in the night clubs—used to get gain, entertain, deceive, defraud, and divide—to mock God,” complained youth pastor Bennie Triplett in 1957.

A few pastors decided it was better to co-opt the newcomer than to rail against it. The head of Focus on the Family, Dr. James Dobson, thought young men needed a certain amount of aggression to shed all their blossoming testosterone, and he cautiously allowed small doses of approved rock to be played in church youth groups. Though the tempo was redolent of sexual intercourse, the problem was not so much the speed of the drum time but the explicit rebellion against parents, country, and sobriety advocated in the lyrics. Secular rock delivered the real thing like a shot of whiskey. Could conservatives frame the square life as the true rebellion? And a bigger question loomed: should Christianity be a separate culture, or should it take over the mainstream?

Nobody could quite agree. Television producer Bob Briner argued that Christian artists should “‘effectively infiltrate’ mainstream culture with ‘the salt of the Gospel,’” while milk-smooth street preacher David Wilkerson targeted bored teenagers led away by “demonic pied pipers” of the rock-and-roll life. The entrepreneur J. Blanton Belk—misnamed in this book as “Frank Buchanan”—took a square-cut folk music show, Up with People, on the road, smuggling light religious thought into a Super Bowl half-time program. Costa Mesa’s Reverend Chuck Smith decided to look past the long hair and psychedelic style of the early counterculture and deem Jesus the “ultimate hippie” for his world-rejecting ways. Out of this movement came swoony ditties like “Since I Opened Up the Door” and “Welcome Back.”

Zoellner offers a balanced assessment of how well Payne succeeds, and what she might have reconsidered if she’d written one more draft:

The CCM chorus had thousands of human voices, so perhaps out of necessity for such an ambitious book, Payne sacrifices depth for breadth; she cannot linger. Major figures such as Amy Grant, the personally conflicted “Queen of Christian Pop,” are given just a few paragraphs without the focused attention they might otherwise deserve.

Grant checked every box in the CCM list of market demands: cheerful, pretty, white, and a member of the Nashville broadcast royalty, lucky enough to be born as the great-granddaughter of radio revival pioneer A. M. Burton, and willing to perform palate-pleasing songs that offered, in the words of a critic, “just an avuncular God, a steady beat and good lighting.” This meant, writes Payne, that “themes of suffering and death, while historically key to the Christian message, must be skipped or at least curtailed.” But beneath the surface Panglossianism and wide smile, Grant—a friend and defender of theological renegade Rich Mullins—struggled with evangelical teachings and was suffering in a marriage to a drug addict. Her 1998 divorce and remarriage hurt her career but did not destroy it.

Zoellner does commend Payne for her incisive examination of how the CCM business model came to be:

Payne’s book is especially strong in describing the unique symbiotic machine that used to churn between Protestant megachurches, shopping mall Christian bookstores, and faith-based radio stations. Whichever songs proved popular in one venue invariably got juiced by the others. “Built to grow like big-box stores, megachurches often functioned as retail outlets for CCM merchandise and as venues for CCM concerts.” Browsers in Christian bookstores found a totalized market among all the ceramic figures, novels, aerobics videos, and Bible studies, while hearing the same songs they’d heard in Sunday church on the affiliate FM stations of K-LOVE, Salem Communications, or Air1. Programming executives joked that a song had to pass the JPM test—the mentions of “Jesus Per Minute,” a test that Amy Grant often failed.

I was not familiar with the JPM concept, but I’m not surprised to find out it was a thing.

And apropos of an age in which first names came to connote personality types - think Karen - I’m also not surprised that CCM marketing coalesced around Becky:

All the consumerism created mountains of data, and executives soon began to talk of their prototypical record buyer as “Becky,” a mother of two who lived in the heartland. The evaluation of a new artist or song depended on whether Becky was going to go for it. “They knew what Becky drove, where she lived, her marital status, the size of her household, where she went on a special night out for dinner, and where she took her children to the drive thru,” writes Payne. The armies of minivan Beckys voted with their money, and in turn, the CCM industry gave them what they wanted: a hopeful message, a friendly Christ, and a message of sexual purity.

Zoellner’s piece also helps shed some light for me on why CCM really does speak to lots of people, even if an exposure to a wider array of types of devotional music provokes aesthetic growth among some who started out on CCM:

Any historian of Christian music, from any era, must contend with the reality that one of the most important outcomes—the spiritual experience of the average listener—is going to be out of reach from the conventional tools of scholarship. Divine work cannot be quantified, and not even human testimony is a reliable dial. Much of the corpus of CCM may have been intellectually flat and artistically derivative, but did it genuinely transform souls along the way, no matter what its snooty critics might have thought? Payne does a good job in gleaning thoughts from ordinary fans via archival sources to get near this question. One of them, Bethany Erickson, grew up on Christian musical Cheez Whiz and thought it summed up the whole faith. Then she learned the tradition was much bigger and more varied. “My college roommate introduced me to Black Gospel music, and I found a genre that expressed suffering without resolution,” she said. Payne also quotes many listeners who defend CCM, those who found soul work in the lyrics and notes, and it would take a severe cynic to wave off their experiences.

As with the music industry in general, the digital age wrought profound changes, and the razzle-dazzle of the big concert and astronomical record sales saw dwindling viability. How did CCM translate from the mega-churches to smaller congregations?

The internet and streaming services burned down and remade most aspects of American cultural production in the early part of the 21st century, and CCM did not escape the vengeance of technology. The debut of Apple iTunes in 2001 sparked a series of mergers, and within 10 years, only four big Christian record labels were left standing. As shopping malls went out of business, so did Christian bookstores. The old ways of retail were at death’s door. Becky was now in her fifties and out of the prime marketing demographic. Salem Communications started playing less CCM and more conservative political talk.

As more youth groups rejected CCM as dated and uncool, a more localized form of “worship music” took its place, played by house bands assembled in individual churches. They played songs longer than the three-minute CCM standards, interspersing them with spoken prayers or long instrumental solos, and found popular traction with Spotify and YouTube. By 2021, the guitar company Fender was selling one out of every three guitars to churches for their praise bands. Payne’s book could have gone into more detail on the house band revolution and illustrated its decentered business model, perhaps with a short profile that explained the break with CCM in clear terms.

The Nashville Christian sound of Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith is already becoming not just a nostalgia oldies product but also, perhaps, an organic American style that will one day be looked upon as representing an era or specific cultural geography, not unlike the way big band stands for 1940s nightclubs or Tin Pan Alley accompanies 1920s Manhattan. While it may have sounded like alien gibberish to those outside Christian circles, its influence ran deep. It paved the way for more hand-raising Pentecostal clout in nondenominational Bible churches, made worship more of a public spectacle, and broke down some of the doctrinal pony walls like infant baptism and predestination in favor of a one-pointed focus on Christ alone, however the listener was to understand him.

“Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment: How Obama Built an Omnipotent Thought Machine, and How it Was Destroyed” by David Samuels at Tablet delivers as advertised, but my primary interest in this one is what Samuels has to say about the digitization of society, per one of Zoellner’s concluding points above. I like the way Samuels starts into that subject:

If anyone in the future cares enough to write an authentic history of the 2024 presidential campaign, they might begin by noting that American politics exists downstream of American culture, which is a deep and broad river. Like any river, American culture follows a particular path, which has been reconfigured at key moments by new technologies. In turn, these technologies, which redefine both space and time—canals and lakes, the postal system, the telegraph, railroads, radio and later television, the internet, and most recently the networking of billions of people in real time on social media platforms—set the rules by which stories are communicated, audiences are configured, and individuals define themselves.

Something big changed sometime after the year 2000 in the way we communicated with each other, and the means by which we absorbed new information and formed a working picture of the world around us. What changed can be understood as the effect of the ongoing transition from the world of 20th-century media to our current digital landscape. This once-every-five-centuries revolution would have large effects, ones we have only just begun to assimilate, and which have largely rendered the assumptions and accompanying social forms of the past century obsolete, even as tens of millions of people, including many who imagine themselves to reside near the top of the country’s social and intellectual pyramids, continue to imagine themselves to be living in one version or another of the long 20th century that began with the advent of a different set of mass communications technologies, which included the telegraph, radio, and film.

The time was ripe, in other words, for a cultural revolution—which would, according to the established patterns of American history, in turn generate a political one.

Again, in this essay I ran across a new term, “permission structure”:

The theory and practice on which the rapid-onset political enlightenment of our digital era was based did not, in fact, begin with Barack Obama. He was—at first, at least—the product being sold. Nor did it originate with the digital technology that has provided the mirror world with its startlingly speedy and effective and nearly universal circuitry.

The methodology on which our current universe of political persuasion is based was born before the internet or iPhones existed, in an attempt to do good and win elections while overcoming America’s historical legacy of slavery and racism. Its originator, David Axelrod, was born to be a great American advertising man—his father was a psychologist, and his mother was a top executive at the legendary Mad Men-era New York City ad agency of Young & Rubicam. Instead, following his father’s suicide, Axelrod left New York City for Chicago, where he attended the University of Chicago, and then became a political reporter for the Chicago Tribune. He then became a political consultant who specialized in electing Black mayoral candidates in white-majority cities. In 2008, Axelrod ran the successful insurgent campaigns that first got Barack Obama the Democratic Party nomination over Hillary Clinton, and then elevated him to the White House.

Axelrod first tested his unique understanding of the theory and practice of public opinion, which he called “permission structures,” in his successful 1989 campaign to elect a young Black state senator named Mike White as the mayor of Cleveland. Where Black mayoral candidates like Coleman Young in Detroit and Marion Barry in Washington had typically achieved power in the 1970s and 1980s by using racially charged symbols and language to turn out large numbers of Black voters in opposition to existing power structures, which they portrayed as inherently racist, White’s history-making campaign attempted to do the opposite: To win by convincing a mix of educated, higher-income white voters to vote for the Black candidate. In fact, White won 81% of the vote in the city’s predominantly white wards while capturing only 30% of the vote in the city’s Black majority wards, which favored his opponent and former mentor on the city council, George C. Forbes, a Black candidate who ran a more traditional “Black power” campaign.

Permission structures, a term taken from advertising, was Axelrod’s secret sauce, the organizing concept by which he strategized campaigns for his clients. Where most consultants built their campaigns around sets of positive and negative ads that promoted the positive qualities of their clients and highlighted unfavorable aspects of their opponents’ characters and records, Axelrod’s unique area of specialization required a more specific set of tools. To succeed, Axelrod needed to convince white voters to overcome their existing prejudices and vote for candidates whom they might define as “soft on crime” or “lacking competence.” As an excellent 2008 New Republicprofile of Axelrod—surprisingly, the only good profile of Axelrod that appears to exist anywhere—put it: “‘David felt there almost had to be a permission structure set up for certain white voters to consider a black candidate,’ explains Ken Snyder, a Democratic consultant and Axelrod protégé. In Cleveland, that was the city’s daily newspaper, The Plain Dealer. Largely on the basis of The Plain Dealer’s endorsement and his personal story, White went on to defeat Forbes with 81 percent of the vote in the city’s white wards.”

n other words, while most political consultants worked to make their guy look good or the other guy look bad by appealing to voters’ existing values, Axelrod’s strategy required convincing voters to act against their own prior beliefs. In fact, it required replacing those beliefs, by appealing to “the type of person” that voters wanted to be in the eyes of others. While the academic social science and psychology literature on permission structures is surprisingly thin, given the real-world significance of Axelrod’s success and everything that has followed, it is most commonly defined as a means of providing “scaffolding for someone to embrace change they might otherwise reject.” This “scaffolding” is said to consist of providing “social proof” (“most people in your situation are now deciding to”) “new information,” “changed circumstances,” “compromise.” As one author put it, “with many applications to politics, one could argue that effective Permission Structures will shift the Overton Window, introducing new conversations into the mainstream that might previously have been considered marginal or fringe.”

By itself, the idea of uniting new theories of mass psychology with new technology in efforts of political persuasion was nothing new. Walter Lippmann based Public Opinion in part on the insights of the Vienna-born advertising genius Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew and the inventor of modern PR. The arrival of television brought political advertising and Madison Avenue even closer together, a fact noted by Norman Mailer in his classic essay “Superman in the Supermarket,” which channeled the insights of Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders. In 1968, the writer Joe McGinniss shocked at least some readers with The Selling of the President, his account of the making of Richard Nixon’s television commercials which showed Madison Avenue admen successfully selling the product of Nixon like dish soap. The title of “political consultant” was itself a creation and a consequence of the television age, signaling the triumph of the ad man over the old-fashioned backroom title of “campaign manager”—a function introduced to national politics by Martin Van Buren, the “Little Magician” from Kinderhook, New York, who built the Democratic Party and elected Andrew Jackson to the Presidency.

It is not surprising then, that following Axelrod’s 1993 success in electing Harold Washington as the first Black mayor of Chicago, Barack Obama—already imagining himself as a future president of the United States—would seek out the Chicago-based consulting wizard to run his campaigns. But Axelrod wasn’t interested. In fact, Obama would spend more than a decade chasing Axelrod—who was far better connected in Chicago than Obama was—in the hopes that he would provide the necessary magic for his political rise. The other Chicago kingmaker that Obama courted was Jesse Jackson Sr., whose Operation PUSH was the city’s most powerful Black political machine, and who liked Obama even less than Axelrod did. The reality was that Obama did best with rich whites, like the board members of the Joyce Foundation and the Pritzker family.

When Axelrod finally agreed to come onboard, he found that Obama was the perfect candidate to validate his theories of political salesmanship on a national scale. First, he engineered Obama’s successful 2004 Senate campaign—a victory made possible by the old-school maneuver of unsealing Republican candidate Jack Ryan’s divorce papers, on the request of Axelrod’s former colleagues at the Chicago Tribune—and then, very soon afterward, Obama’s campaigns for the presidency, which formally commenced in 2007.

It worked. Once in office, though, Axelrod and Obama found that the institutions of public opinion—namely the press, on which Axelrod’s permission structure framework depended—were decaying quickly in the face of the internet. Newspapers like the Cleveland Plain Dealer, as well as national television networks like CBS, which Axelrod relied on as validators, were now barely able to pay their bills, having lost their monopoly on viewers and advertisers to the internet and to newly emerging social media platforms.

For my money, though, Samuels comes to such an erroneous conclusion, namely, that “exceptionalism is the master narrative of American greatness, and today its only true defender seems to be Donald Trump” (come on; Trump is solely motivated by self-glorification) that I may have to spend some more time thinking through his entire thesis as presented here. Still, the spot-on nature of particular insights makes the piece a worthwhile read. I don’t think he is just trying to be clever about shilling for Squirrel-Hair. There’s too much that’s correct about his analysis up to that point.

Count on Seth Mandel at Commentary to bring moral clarity to a development such as the Gaza ceasefire:

Indeed, according to the IDF, “Muhammad Hasham Zahedi Abu Al-Rus, a Nukhba terrorist who infiltrated Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and participated in the massacre at the Nova Music Festival, was eliminated overnight in an intelligence-based strike. Additionally, the IAF conducted strikes on approx. 50 terrorist targets across Gaza over the last day, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists, military compounds, weapons storage facilities, launch posts, weapons manufacturing sites, and observation posts.”

Meanwhile, the Washington Post’s headline writers must think they’re being pranked, as they ping-pong from “Gazans eye ceasefire with mixed feelings: ‘What do we have left?’” to “Ceasefire deal delayed as Netanyahu bargains with far-right allies” and back to “Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal brings hope for devastated northern Gaza”—again, one right after the other.

It’s Schrödinger’s ceasefire!

The real lesson, however, is that there is no such thing as a permanent ceasefire so long as Hamas is in power. After all, there was a ceasefire in place on Oct. 6, 2023. And the trove of reporting in the wake of the attacks made clear that Hamas never had any intention of upholding that ceasefire: its restraint was a key part of its Oct. 7 strategy to lull Israel (and the world) into thinking it was becoming a responsible party in Mideast politics.

Yes, this particular deal is unique because of the circumstances, namely Israel’s hopes of getting back its captives—not because it is going to bring about a permanent truce.

The Middle East you’ll find in Western newspapers doesn’t exist. The reality for those who live in Israel is that, as its enemies say every day, there is one conflict: the attempt to eradicate the Jewish state.

Also at Commentary, Tevi Troy looks at “What Obamacare Hath Wrought”:

Obamacare’s impact in the health-care arena also increased cynicism about American institutions. While Obamacare did reduce the number of uninsured people, it did not eliminate the problem. Furthermore, average out-of-pocket health spending rose, leaving Americans still feeling the squeeze.

At the same time, Obamacare broke Obama’s vaunted promise, “If you like your health-care plan, you can keep it.” As many as 9.3 million people lost their coverage in Obamacare’s initial open-enrollment period. When the magnitude of the lost coverages became apparent, Obama himself apologized for his broken promise, saying in January 2013, “I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me.” Politifact, not known for its right-wing bias, named Obama’s promise 2013’s “Lie of the Year.”

“If you like your health-care plan, you can keep it” was the most prominent broken promise, but it was far from the only one. According to a recent report by the conservative Paragon Health Institute, there were at least a dozen broken promises, or places where the law failed to meet expectations. Life expectancy has dropped, so that the ACA did not fulfill its promise to save lives. The program was supposed to be limited to U.S. citizens, but Paragon found that subsidized ACA plans had enrolled unauthorized immigrants. Emergency-room use did not decrease, as promised, but has actually increased, including for non-emergency services. Finally, the individual market did not become a robust marketplace, with enrollment coming in significantly short of expectations. These various disconnects between what was promised and the reality further reduced trust in politicians and also in our governing institutions.

Perhaps the most significant of the broken promises for our long-term prospects as a nation was the promise to “bend the cost curve” downward. The years following the passage of Obamacare saw a significant increase in the debt and deficit. When the ACA was passed, the total public debt as a percent of GDP was about 88 percent. Now it’s approximately 120 percent, and we are seeing an increasing unwillingness from both parties to address the issue of deficit spending and debt accumulation.

There have obviously been many factors involved in the debt increase, but the ACA has certainly been one of them. Obamacare relied heavily on Medicaid to meet its coverage goals, and that program has increased its share of federal and state funding from 22.2 percent in 2010 to 26.9 percent in 2021—or an overall growth of more than 20 percent. In addition, federal spending on Obamacare subsidies is increasing. According to the House Ways and Means Committee, Obamacare subsidies—government payments to subsidize the purchase of insurance plans—amounted to $57 billion five years ago and are now projected to be $125 billion in 2025.

The health-cost problem is not abating. Health care as a percent of GDP is now about 18 percent, about where it was when Obamacare passed, but it is projected to hit 19.7 percent in 2032. This number would have been even worse without an unexpected recent dip in Medicare spending that appears to be mostly unrelated to the ACA. We as a nation are going to have to make some hard decisions about health-care spending in the years ahead, and Obamacare is not making those choices any easier.

At the same time, there is a general belief that the law was more of a gift to the health-care industry than to the American people. Pharmaceuticals, insurance companies, and hospitals have all done well in the years since Obamacare passed, despite assumptions that the law would rein in excess corporate profits. The S&P Health Care Sector index, a collection of health-care stocks, has grown from $365.16 after the law’s passage to $1,797.20 today, a staggering increase of 392 percent. Little wonder that Americans are increasingly skeptical of the entanglement of big government and big business.

Daren Jonescu, an expatriate Canadian living in Seoul, South Korea and teaching university philosophy there, has a recent post at his blog titled “Three Reflections On the Daily Life of Higher Souls.” The three are the self-refuting bromide that “everyone does it” is, filling one’s time productively, and the importance of authenticity, or, as he puts it, “the self-understanding and honesty with oneself to recognize when circumstances are confronting you with the alternative of playing a role for the sake of social comfort.” I will excerpt reflection number two here:

One should not be too proud of, or too engaged in, one’s hobbies; ideally, one would have none. A hobby is something you do primarily for distraction or amusement, and which you have done enough to have become moderately good at it and moderately enthusiastic about it, but which, insofar as you have designated it as your hobby, you have probably come to identify with too closely, either because you cannot think of anything more essential to do with your time and energy, or because you lack the will or sense of purpose to commit yourself seriously to the truly essential. A hobby, as we normally perceive such, is a means of occupying your time with the comforting illusion of purpose, a convenient and ready-made excuse to explain why you are not more fundamentally engaged in your existence.

Have a great weekend.