(re)Introducing Better Strangers!
(re)Introducing Better Strangers!
I've taken the summer off to move, and there have been a lot of new followers since then! Here's what you'll be getting in your inboxes in the coming months.
Hey strangers! I’ve been quiet on here for a while: since June, we sold our house in New Jersey, moved our family across state lines, and did an entirely stay-at-home summer for our kids. When we got settled at our new place just outside of DC and got our kids back into school, I decided it was time to confront a lot of the mental health stuff that’s been destroying my ability to function for the better part of a decade. So the break has been a bit longer than I planned, and during that time I’ve gotten a lot of new followers, mostly courtesy of recommendations from my friends at
and . So I thought I’d take the opportunity to reintroduce myself and this publication to you all.As it happens, the stuff I’ve been struggling with overlaps pretty heavily with what I write about here at Better Strangers. I’ve long had anxiety around what Alan Moore has called humanity’s “catastrophic trajectory,” and I’ve struggled with guilt (even shame!) at the fact that I chose to bring two kids into a world that may be irreparably fucked. It doesn’t help that raising kids at the moment is a nightmare: The U.S. Surgeon General recently issued a crisis advisory on the mental health of American parents, who are suffering from a lack of social support, absurdly high childcare costs, and a healthcare system that’s run like a casino. Not to mention the worry about school shootings, the loss of reproductive rights, the rise of fascism, and the fact that sometimes fires happening thousands of miles away blot out the sun.
On top of that, my ass has also been extensively and repeatedly kicked by my struggle with nihilism, which started when I left the Catholic Church in my teens. Leaving the church was a good thing, but there was no one in my life who was able to show me how to navigate that sort of transition, and so I sank into a pretty cynical, nihilistic worldview.
Britt Hartley, who I’ve interviewed here at Better Strangers, talks about how people who pick apart their religion often go on to deconstruct just about everything else in their lives: their politics, their views on gender and sexuality and patriarchy, their views on race and culture, their understanding of morality, even their understanding of reality. None of this is inherently bad — the world would be a better place if more people did this — but we rely on our worldviews to get us through the day. It’s sort of like taking apart your ship while you’re sailing through a storm. Your reasons for taking apart the ship could be great, but the most likely end result is probably going to be your drowning.
The problem is that we need people to deconstruct their worldviews. The world would be a better place if more people were willing to ask themselves tough questions about what they believe and how they choose to live. Actually, that might be understating it: if more people don’t start doing just that, we might not survive as a species.
But deconstruction without reconstruction — as I’ve learned the hard way — is dangerous. The famed writer Alan Moore (who I’ve written extensively on in my “Wondrous Creatures” series) characteristically frames this problem in magical terms:
One of the most useful formulas in alchemy… is solve et coagula, where solve is the act of dissolving something, where we take something apart and study how it works — what in our modern terms would be called analysis... The other part of the formula is coagula, which is synthesis rather than analysis, holism rather than reductionism, the act of putting something back together in a hopefully improved form. Once you take the watch to pieces and see what was making it run slow, you put it back together and hopefully it works better.
I'd say that we've had an awful lot of solve in our culture, but far too little coagula. There are people who seem daunted by the complexity of our culture to the point that they'll shy away from it rather than try to put those thousands of jigsaw pieces together into some sort of useful, coherent picture.
Better Strangers: Your Friendly Cultural Coagulant
Better Strangers started a few years back when I began making TikTok videos for what I inelegantly called “the anti-despair reading list.” In it, I tried to share books that have helped me better understand what is happening in our world, and how we can start productively building towards something better. This connected with a much larger audience than I expected it to, so I’ve built out this Substack alongside my TikTok (@betterstrangersbooks) to try and explore those ideas. The tagline, if you need something quick and pithy, is:
Facing a bleak world with hope, curiosity, and imagination.
A big inspiration for this project was the work of British writer
, who said in an interview with The Ransom Note:I think the problem is that at some point in the 1980s we gave up on the future. Before then there were all these positive futures imagined in things like Star Trek. It seems to me that the last ditch attempt to say something positive about the future was in 1989 in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, when they say ‘The future will be great — it’s a bit like now, but with really great waterslides’. That was the best they could do. Ever since then the future has been shown as environmental apocalypse, zombie films, all of these things. And to create the future, first you have to imagine it, so this is a very worrying thing.
My hope is this newsletter helps you to better imagine a future that we can survive in, thrive in, and maybe even enjoy.
This is an almost impossibly broad editorial mandate, but to give you an idea, in the past I’ve written about mutual aid, anarchism, media literacy, mental health, stoicism, Taoism, psychogeography, secular spirituality, sustainable travel, the radical potential of libraries, the anticapitalist movement, and the one place where all of those things converge, the Greatest Band of the 20th Century: Chumbawamba1.
What you get with your subscription
I will be writing two posts for Better Strangers each week:
A Tuesday column. As of right now, I’m finishing up the Alan Moore course Wondrous Creatures, and I’m in the planning stages of a course on Human Rights in the 21st century. I’ll also add to the Mutual Aid course as things come up, and I’ll do occasional one-off columns on books or ideas that I think you might find interesting. For the most part, the Tuesday column will be for paid subscribers only.
A Friday Round-up. This will include a TL;DR of the Tuesday Column, as well as book, movie, and music recommendations, links to articles you might find interesting, videos, songs, etc., as well as brief snippets on topics we’ve discussed in other articles. This will be free to all.
About me
I should probably tell you something about myself other than “I suffer from depression,” right? This is a safe place to stop reading the article, I don’t have any more vital information here, but for those who have asked themselves “who the fuck is this guy?” I have the following answer:
My name is Matt Hershberger. I was born into a conservative Catholic family in Cincinnati, Ohio, which was a bummer, but I had two escapes from that life that have more or less determined its trajectory ever since: books and travel. I’ve been an avid reader for as long as I can remember, and my Dad owns a travel business, so I got to go to a lot more places and experience a lot more cultures than the average Midwestern 90s kid did.
When I got to college, I spent as much of my time as possible abroad. I did the Semester at Sea program, visiting 10 countries in 4 months while living on a refurbished cruise ship with about 700 other students and professors, including the Nobel Laureate and anti-apartheid campaigner, Desmond Tutu. After this trip — which included visits to post-apartheid South Africa and the Cambodian Killing Fields — I got heavily involved in human rights activism back at my alma mater, Penn State. Before I left undergrad, I did another 5 months in Buenos Aires, where again I focused on human rights, particularly the history of the disappeared in the US-backed Dirty War, and an internship in Beijing for the English language newspaper the China Daily, which I crashed and burned out of after pitching an article on the Tiananmen Square massacre on its 20th anniversary.
Upon graduation, I spent several years in Cincinnati working temp jobs, road tripping, and traveling until I got into grad school at the London School of Economics, where I studied human rights and met my future wife. I moved with her to DC, where I worked for the pro-immigrant American Immigration Council for a couple years before we moved to my wife’s home state of New Jersey. There, I tried my luck as a professional travel writer in the listicle-happy, Buzzfeedified internet of the early 2010s. Upon the birth of my first child, I quit that job to work for local library, where I was a reference librarian, a comics buyer, and an organizer of programming around sustainability, digital literacy, and — just for funsies — video games.
I left that job a couple of years ago to focus on writing again (and take some of the strain of childcare costs off of our family), and that is how you’ve found me here or on TikTok. Thanks, broken system!
I think it’s important to disclose your biases to your readers, so for the record:
My politics are unapologetically leftist. I tend to think of the anarchist view of the world as perhaps the most humane and reasonable, but I’m not a purist by any stretch. Progressives, socialists, communists, even moderate Democrats usually find my stuff readable, if occasionally objectionable. Nazis, Republicans, capitalists, and edgelord internet trolls2 typically do not love my writing. If you belong to the latter group — I do not care about your opinion of my work, go scream it into a pillow somewhere, mmkay?
After I left the Catholic Church as a teenager, I became an atheist. My alignment with that movement shifted after I met Richard Dawkins in London and realized he was kind of a tool. I’ve since become a lot more interested in exploring my own spirituality, which has led me towards Taoism, yoga, magic, and psychotropic drugs like cannabis and psilocybin. You can expect me to be impatient with institutionalized religion, New Age pseudoscience, and general irrationality, but open to unconventional ideas about spirituality, human consciousness, and psychology.
I’m a white, cisgendered, straight man from a privileged background. I try to be conscious of that when I write — I try to be a good LGBTQ+ ally, I try to be antiracist, I try to be anticolonial, etc. — but it would be impossible (and unethical) for me to try and hide my identity or divorce it from my writing, so if something hits you wrong, please understand it was almost certainly unintentional. If you need to call me out, just do it nicely and I’ll listen and try to do better.
I don’t give a fuck about free speech in my comments section. I keep the comments on because I like most of my readers and often have nice, respectful discussions with them in the comments. I’m not interested in cruelty, contentious debates, or flamewars. Assholes get ignored and blocked, even if they’re right. Fuck off to Truth Social or X with that energy.
Six of one, half dozen of the other, tbh.
🥳welcome back!
Welcome back!!