The Art of Burning
Lee Chang-dong, the Death of the English Major, and the Dopamine Casino
Greetings, degenerates. The following is a collection of thoughts I’ve had the last couple weeks, which I hope to arrange into a kind of longform journal—a record of what I’m reading, watching, and hearing at this moment in my life, and how I’m making sense of the ever-warming world. The goal is neither clarity nor concision. I am more interested in honest derangement.
Welcome to the bonfire.
As some of you know, I consider Lee Chang-dong’s Burning (2018) one of the greatest films ever made. Nobody agrees with me, and that’s OK. Not all love is meant to be shared.
The main character, Jeong-su, is an aspiring writer. Which is to say, he’s basically useless, masturbates around the clock, and never writes a word. On a trip into town, Jeong-su comes across the magnetic Hae-mi, who insists they’re old friends despite his inability to recognize her. Unfazed, she admits she underwent plastic surgery. They reconnect over dinner, and she tells him she’s going to Africa. When he asks her why, she says she’s learning pantomime.
“Look, I can eat tangerines whenever I want,” she says, peeling an imaginary fruit. “This has nothing to do with talent... Don’t think there is a tangerine here. Just forget there isn’t one. The important thing is to think you really want one. Then your mouth will water.”
Already, Lee is tugging at the scrim of our disbelief. The laconic Jeong-su seems to communicate only through questions, and yet Hae-mi doesn’t seem interested in answering any of them. Were they actually childhood friends? Why is Hae-mi really going to Africa? What do they want from each other?
Each time I watch the movie, the dreamier this scene feels. Hae-mi and Jeong-su speak to each other in a language of non-sequitur, misrememberings, uncanny metaphors. One can’t help but wonder… Are we really sitting in this late-night café? Or are we in a kind of haunted memory palace, watching Jeong-su summon ghosts from some ever-receding shore in his mind—animating them, interrogating them, stalking them? Much later, we learn that Jeong-su’s mother abandoned him as a child, and that his father—recently arrested for assaulting a police officer—forced him to burn the clothes she left behind.
After polishing off her tangerine, Hae-mi tells Jeong-su how the Bushmen of the Kalahari recognize two kinds of starvation. There is the need for food, known as Little Hunger, and there is the desire to know the meaning of life. This is the Great Hunger.
Here we go…
In a recent piece for the New Yorker, Nathan Heller chronicles the ongoing decline of the English major in American universities. For years, humanities enrollments have largely correlated to economic boom and bust. Good times, easy money, liberal arts galore. Not anymore. The stats are bleaker than they ever have been. In the last decade alone, collegiate study of English and History has dropped a full third.
A 2021 Gallup poll found that college graduates read, on average, “about six fewer books per year than they did between 2002 and 2016.” A rough drop of, you guessed it, a third. A separate study by the Pew Research Center revealed children are reading less than at any point before in the life of the data.
Aspiring writers, it would seem, are in short supply. But why? Heller plays with the idea that technology is in part responsible for lack of interest in literature. We may not be reading books, but we’re drinking from a different well. A firehose, more like. Surfing the interwebs, doomscrolling Twitter, raveling Reddit copypasta, swiping up on TikTok and right on Tinder, la la la this sentence already bores me...
Welcome to my goldfish brain. Every inch of the real world lies at our fingertips every waking moment. What use do you or I have for imaginary worlds of words? Maybe this dichotomy is a bit too charitable. It’s more useful to think of books as simply legacy fiction, obsolete in the face of newer, faster fantasy, where algorithms mainline tantalizing soundbites and manufactured outrage straight into our veins.
Twitter feed, Insta reel, Twitch livestream, Spotify podcast… For many of us, these form the primary Prism through which we process the world. Want to mix a cocktail? Stanley Tucci will teach you. Read the news? Look or listen no farther than the The Daily, or Fresh Air. Even the Federal Reserve holds court over Zoom conference.
Could it be that this latest generation of “content” is simply more dimensional and engaging than what came before? A more satiating taste of reality?
Or—like a certain tangerine—have we simply forgotten it’s not there?
Heller provides an array of possible explanations for our disaffection with literature. Above all, however, he suggests we somehow “follow the money.” Where is the money going? The algo’s invisible hand doesn’t reward patience, much less anonymity. And a life spent with literature requires both to survive.
Eyeballs and ad dollars—isn’t this the fuel our Prism runs on? From the day they first pass through the campus gates, students shoulder an unsettling burden. Everything they have consumed has taught them to value visibility and production; these are the modern signatures of success. If Patrick Bateman were alive today, he would be an influencer.
From privileged high achievers to second-generation immigrants looking for a foothold, all students face increasing pressure to “make it” as quickly as possible. Naturally, this means trading in majors of more ambiguous value for the prestige pathways: engineering, medicine, finance, law, and business. There is an implicit understanding now that the latter is where real education happens. Many students seem to find solace, says Heller, in the fact that these fields are grounded in statistical rigor and actionable knowledge. In other words, the prestige paths appear more real.
“I think the problem for the humanities is you can feel like you’re not really going anywhere,” says one interviewee. “And that’s very scary.”
There is a common thread through all of this, and it’s the opposite of surprising: Education is largely perceived to be transactional.
I am certainly not immune. For a very long time, I never allowed myself to imagine a career in the arts. It only ever arrived to me as fantasy, the shadow of a belief in the back of my brain that I might, one day, should certain celestial bodies align, write something people would like to read. And even now, the doubt has never left me. I am still in the Prism.
I arrived at college in the fall of 2012, blissfully ignorant to whatever it was I’d be doing the rest of my life. Suddenly, I had decisions to make: What would I major in? What classes would I take? How would I spend the summer? It’s clear to me now that this power to decide was, as Marlo Stanfield says, “one of them good problems.” That is, a luxury of privilege. Still, for some reason, maybe for that reason, I didn’t believe then I had the constitution to commit myself to such an uncertain path. I knew I loved books, wrote passably well, valued creativity, but could I make a life out of any of that? Always, the overriding question was: Where would I even begin? I had no money. And growing up, I watched my friends and family argue about money enough to worry about it myself. I was trained to worry about money long before I needed any money. Looking back, I think what I truly craved was freedom, and money was the closest approximation of freedom available. I decided to major in Public Policy with a minor in Finance. And four years later, I didn’t hate it just enough to go to Wall Street and spend the next five years as an options trader.
Here is a dangerous truth: Anyone can learn to do anything. Give me six months, and I can learn how to do your job, and you can learn how to do mine. Doesn’t matter if it’s stand-up comedy, long-haul truck driving, or interest rate derivatives. With the exception of a handful of galaxy brains, intelligence is an acquired skill in the modern world, and so is proficiency. You just have to 1) pay attention, and 2) do the work. And then, not only can you learn to do anything, you can learn to enjoy anything.
Convince yourself you want it, and your mouth will water. The rest is pantomime.
Isn’t this a good thing—that, in the moment, we can learn to enjoy anything? Maybe. The danger lies in that the world as we experience it doesn’t reward freewheeling curiosity or passion projects. The Prism is transactional; it rewards dopamine. The chemical rush we feel when we want something and then we get it. Of course, there’s nothing inherently “wrong” with dopamine. It’s a reward system our species evolved to survive. As ancient as days, and a powerful source of motivation, vitality, and pleasure. Some scientists believe our advanced dopamine network is what originally gave humans a leg up in the animal kingdom.
But like any survival mechanism, it is also ripe for abuse. Enter the dopamine tornado, and you will find yourself not in the Prism, but the Casino—a roulette wheel of addiction, anemia, and self-deception. Really, really bad things happen to people who block or deplete their dopamine pathways.
Think about it like this. With every transaction, we’re exchanging our time, money, or attention for some perceived future return—a job, a relationship, a lifestyle. In short, we’re making a trade. And if I have learned anything on Wall Street, when placing bets, gamblers tend to lie to themselves.
Looking back, how confident was I that this vision of “earning my freedom” wasn’t just a useful distortion? And what, precisely, was I surviving? What was I afraid of?
Inevitably, the slots run so many times that, in the long arc of your lifetime, you will run into the edge case. Or rather, the universe will rearrange itself such that, one day, you find your hand on the electric fence surrounding the safety of your vantage point. There is a beautiful term for this, coined by Neal Stephenson in his essay “In the Beginning Was the Command Line.” He calls this kind of disorientation metaphor shear—"when you realize that you’ve been living and thinking inside of a metaphor that is essentially bogus.”
Just before Hae-mi leaves for Africa, Jeong-su discovers he has inherited his father’s farm on the cusp of the DMZ. His shoulders perpetually sag with the burden of listless youth—orphaned by his past, yet unable to conceive of the future that awaits him. He wakes up in the dead of night to hear distant loudspeakers carry North Korean propaganda across the mountainside. As if Lee were reminding the audience that, all around us, reality is being distorted.
Hae-mi returns at last, and Jeong-su heads to the airport to pick her up. Much to his surprise, she has a mystery man wrapped around her arm: Ben! Older, lavishly wealthy, worldly, and it turns out, quite the cheeky little vampire. For obvious reasons, Jeong-su gets territorial. “There are so many Gatsbys in Korea,” he warns Hae-mi. And it is hard to ignore the class tensions swirling around the uneasy trio. Both Jeong-su and Hae-mi are ridden by debt, whether familial or financial. And Ben… Well, it’s never clear if he's just another responsibility-free trustafarian looking for his next fix, or something more sinister—a con man, a serial predator, even a murderer. Within minutes of arriving, he tells them: “I’ve never shed a single tear in my life.” Already, he is everything Hae-mi and Jeong-su know they can never be.
The three head to Jeong-su’s farm for a night of old-fashioned revelry in the countryside. Drinking, smoking, cow-tipping, whatever… the night is young! Ben, always in search of stimulation, lights a joint, walks to his Porsche, and turns up Miles Davis’s soundtrack for Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows. As they watch dusk fall, Hae-mi suddenly stumbles to the edge of the property. She takes off her shirt and, making a bird with her hands, begins to perform the dance of the Great Hunger, the camera slowly lifting up, up, and away toward the Orwellian hellscape on the horizon. Ladies & germs, this is cinema.
With Hae-mi asleep, the boys level with each other on the porch. Jeong-su tells Ben how his mother abandoned him to escape his abusive father. Everything she left behind, anything that might remind him of her, he says, he was forced to set ablaze.
Without missing a beat, Ben reveals to Jeong-su a secret of his own: he burns down greenhouses. “It’s a clear crime,” he says with a smile. “You can make it disappear, as if it never existed… It’s like they’re all waiting for me to burn them down.”
A few days later, Jeong-su picks up a surprise phone call from Hae-mi, which abruptly cuts out. As precipitously as she arrived in his life, like a glitch, she vanishes. Her phone number is disconnected, her apartment is empty, her family hasn’t seen her. Jeong-su grows convinced Ben was speaking in double-entendre, that the “greenhouses” he burns down are in fact women he disappears.
This is never confirmed. You could say the central mystery of Burning is what, precisely, is burning. Women? Earth? Mother Earth?? Oh my. Hae-mi has gone up in smoke, just like his mother did long ago, and it is here that Jeong-su’s world starts to unravel—a psychotic break, a metaphor collapsing.
“The truth,” as Borges wrote in Tlon, Uqbar, “is that [reality] longed to yield.”
Make no mistake, Jeong-su lives in the Casino. So do I, and so do you. Some of us have a mere foot in the door, and others have forgotten there is a world outside the door.
Look no further than the following graph, called the Chart of the Century:
In the last two decades, everything above the blue box (Average Wages) has gotten more expensive, and everything below more affordable. Riddle me this: The market is begging to sell you smartphones, software, toys, and TVs, and squeezing you for every last penny when it comes to hospital services, medical care, and higher education. This is the Casino. The house has got you hooked on dopamine, and now they’re going to hook you up to an IV you can’t afford because you’re drowning in student debt.
It’s telling that, just before Ben comes into his life, Jeong-su is whiling away his days in the hinterlands, putzing around the farm in basketball shorts, inhaling his meals in front of the TV, and picking up the telephone only to realize nobody is on the other end of the line. A news program broadcasts the rapidly rising youth unemployment in Korea, then immediately segues to coverage of Trump championing the American worker. When he first tries to go out, Jeong-su can’t get the truck to start. Which part of the Casino are you in?
After attending his father’s hearing, the lawyer asks if Jeong-su graduated from college. Yes, he says, he studied Creative Writing. “But you still don’t have a job?” Jeong-su says he’s working on a novel, but it’s clear he hasn’t written a word. “How about writing about your father?” says the lawyer. “In my opinion, he’s like a protagonist. Look at his life! It’s so turbulent. He was nuts back in the day…”
And voila, Ben appears—the mirror image of the man Jeong-su’s father could have been had he adequately sublimated his rage. Once more, we get the sense that Hae-mi and Ben only ever arrive as apparition—would-be characters conjured from the depths of Jeong-su’s subconscious to audition for the novel he can’t bring himself to write. He is a storyteller adrift in his own lucubrations, assembling his cast before our eyes, surprised at the breadth of their feeling, at what he can make them do. As the real world around him smolders, the rising smoke begins to tease the unwritten story out of him.
So what is dopamine? Dr. Andrew Huberman gives a fascinating overview of how exactly the neurotransmitter impacts the body on his podcast Huberman Lab. Dopamine release, he says, changes the probability that certain neural circuits will be active. It modulates “not just our levels of energy, but also… our feelings of whether we can or cannot accomplishment something.”
When we eat food, have sex, lift weights, hit a vape, dopamine release hits a peak. Critically, it then drops below our previous baseline. This phenomenon is happening in our body multiple times a day, every day, and even forms the backdrop of conditions such as postpartum depression and post-race blues. Eventually, dopamine levels will stabilize, but the process takes time. If we keep tapping our dopamine supply before that happens, the baseline keeps resetting lower, and we get desperate. We start pulling the same levers over and over, laying the groundwork for a vicious cycle which, ultimately, leads to debilitating dependency.
And what is addiction, says Huberman, if not the “progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure.” He cautions against lifestyles—all too common in the attention economy—in which dopamine is evoked not just by some of our activities, but by all of them. And so our baseline progressively resets lower, until it reaches a low enough threshold that we can’t feel pleasure at all.
Patterns of this are quite literally everywhere. In trading parlance, the cycle commonly manifests in a practice known as “tick-watching.” You put on a trade, and from that instant onwards your eyes are glued to your screen, flickering to catch every “tick” or fluctuation, relishing spikes in the right direction and flinching with every adverse thrust. You’re not processing reality anymore. You have engaged in a transaction, and you are processing the noise of your own desire.
Sensations like this are hardly limited to trading. Imagine you are posting a photo on Instagram, delivering a presentation at work, going out for drinks in the city, meeting someone on a date. Notice how your perception of reality warps as soon as you have skin in the game. You have come to want something, and the world as you now experience it has conspired to take it away from you.
By no means am I an authority on leading a happy life. Nor am I trying to imagine a life without technology. And while trading is no longer my profession, I regret few of the choices that took me there—my major, my first job—and I don’t think you should either. After all, I met wonderful people, made long-lasting friends, and got to know myself along the way. None of these things arose because I was trying to get something out of them. They weren’t transactions, but the price, in hindsight, was right.
It's worth contemplating—what we learned when, and why. The primary consequence of the transaction-junkie mindset described above, it seems to me, is that it kills our capacity to feel awe.
Consider dating apps. Two people swipe through legions of potential partners, match, get excited, meet up for a date, and whoosh, suddenly all the oxygen leaves the room. I can’t help but wonder if two people showing up in this way—each trying to make their own version of something happen—can ever make that thing happen. Nope, not in the casino. Am I going to be alone forever? Maybe.
Where is my lifetime supply of tangerines?
Literature doesn’t need to make anything happen. Literature is a community of souls sending up smoke signals in total darkness. Literature succeeds by existing, across generations and borders and against the odds.
In the way that Burning is a novelistic adaptation of Murakami’s “Barn Burning,” itself an adaptation of a 1939 story by William Faulkner, whose hometown I very randomly happen to share. Steven Yeun, who plays Ben in Burning, described the filming process as a kind of freestyle jazz. They would do take after take; Lee would watch the footage and say, “Nah, today’s not the right day.” Then they’d come back days later, a flock of geese would fly overhead, and Lee would say, “That’s what I was looking for!”
At last, our all-important almost-oranges. Hold onto your hat, I’m about to say something profoundly uninteresting. The real tangerines are the fruits of labor. Hard work, discipline, pleasure in the risk itself rather than the reward. All of this requires an amicable relationship with suffering. We must learn to be burned.
What does that mean? Have conversations that go nowhere. Read books and never talk about them again. Turn the forgettable and pointless into a way of life. Starve yourself for a day, and then do things you’re bad at. Run laps around the track until you feel nothing, can’t go on, go on, fail again, fail better… Whatever it was Beckett said. I just know, when I find nothing again, I’m on the other side of the electric fence.
“He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick… A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.”
—2666, Roberto Bolaño
So what happened to the English major? Easy. There was a tech boom, and we started rewarding people for other things. Multiplayer games, products and content designed, like prescription pills, to be ingested forever. What is “content” now without a following? The word itself has been co-opted, financialized, made into a commodity. And capitalism, as Deleuze said, is “profoundly illiterate.”
For the pyromaniacs stubborn enough to breathe the fumes, there is another door. A trapdoor, leading down into the full heart and empty belly of the underground, a smoke-filled cave packed with poets, detectives, degenerate gamblers, street musicians, merchants with nothing to sell, all of us gathered around the bonfire. Something inextinguishable.
The future comes at a price, I always say.