Why I’m a Quaker

Ozy Brenan | Thing of Things | Jan 08, 2026

I’ve hesitated to write this series, because I’m not a very good Quaker. I worry that people will look at my behavior and assume that that’s what all Quakers are like. But people keep asking why I’m a Quaker and what I get out of it, so there’s clearly enough interest that I shouldn’t wait until I can reliably remember I’m a pacifist.

Religious studies scholars distinguish between orthopraxic and orthodoxic religions. In orthodoxic religions, such as mainstream Christianity and Islam, religious practice is fundamentally about believing the right things: reciting the Shahada, assenting to the Nicene Creed, or accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior. In orthopraxic religions, such as Judaism and most historic polytheisms, religious practice is fundamentally about doing the right ritual: celebrating the holy days, following the dietary rules, avoiding taboos.

But you can act in a way that you’re proud of. You can know that you did the best you could, however the dice fall. If you’ve spent your entire life muddling through, doing what’s justifiable or good enough, I can’t overstate how wonderful it is to do exactly what you’re supposed to be doing.

And you can always have that peace. You can take this advice from Epictetus, if you like, but I prefer the psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl:

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.

No matter how awful your circumstances, you have a choice. It may be small. If your circumstances are awful enough, the difference between choosing good and choosing bad may be barely detectable from the outside. Abuse survivors’ acts of resistance may be a gesture or a glance or even a thought; similarly, the inner strength it takes for some depressed people to take a brief morning walk is unimaginable to those who have never been there.

Unlike Frankl, I’m not a concentration camp inmate; all my problems are my own fault. So what I find comforting is the corollary that I can’t cut myself off from the Inner Light either. However much I have sacrificed my inner freedom and dignity, however many of my choices have been cruel or unwise or simply fucked up, I can in every moment make the choice to be kind. And if I fail to do so in this moment? Then I always have another chance in the next.

Don’t Let The Machines Do The Living

Anne Helen Petersen | Culture Study | Feb 08, 2026

Some AI programs function like tools. People have been using Claude Code, for example, to streamline coding work in a way that’s more like using Photoshop to touch something up than, say, asking a chatbot to write an essay for you. Others, like chatbots, mimic human text and speech — and have become a primary means by which people interact with these language models. It’s because of this mimicry that so many people use them to take the place of learning or interpersonal relationships — it’s also why people who have used them as therapists have developed psychosis-like issues from overuse. LLMs don’t work for therapy in part because therapy, like learning, resists optimization. It plays out differently for everyone, and requires discernment to arrive at the right tone, approach, or style. You don't "complete" therapy, just like you never "complete" learning. The process is the thing.

When I apply this concept to my own, grown-ass life, it's mostly a reminder that if I can't do everything I think I should do without resorting to an LLM — then I am doing too much. If I can't spend time testing out bean recipes, delighting in my success and failure, in my pursuit of the ultimate vegan bean recipe, I am doing too much. If I can't write a somewhat uncomfortable email declining a speaking invitation, I am doing too much. It is up to us, individually, to discern how, and when, an LLM can function as a power tool, facilitating a task (like, say, summer camp scheduling) that has turned into a maddening time vortex — and when it becomes a replacement for the stuff that takes time because it should take time.

It should take time to figure out which hike you want to take. It should take time to learn how to make bread. It should take time to read, to really read, Toni Morrison or James Joyce. It should take time to figure out what kind of music moves you, and what kind of clothes feel like you, and to discern the different calls a bird makes. It should take time to make friends. To grow a tomato. To learn a language. To learn how to play a tabletop game. To make a meal. To learn who you are, and what matters to you. Obsession, craft, improvement, and learning are all inefficient parts of life. They are also the part of life where you are actually doing the living.

Automation has already done so much to decrease the breathing room of our days. To resist further compression is to embrace a life oriented not towards its endpoint, but the tangled yet intermittently transcendent experience of living. It is a surrender, of sorts, to the idea that we will never actually master this world. But we can tunnel into the work of learning about it — be curious about it, utterly bewildered by it, deeply enthralled with it — in a way a machine never can.