Ominous

SoHo, New York City, December 2023

I remember the feeling well. Clyde, the proprietor of The Drawing Room salon, is the only person I trust to cut my hair. I am very particular about my hair. I had to scheme to become his client. He doesn’t take on new clients, so I scheduled an appointment with one of his colorists at a time when I thought he would be there and cornered him at his own place of business to bark my praise of his work and hair-cutting philosophy at him until he agreed to take me on as a client. Clyde is expensive by any reasonable standard, but he is also the best value, as a session with him includes free therapy and Stoic wisdom. Clyde and I spoke of the future on this particular day and were very much in sync.

New York City is a great place to get a feel for the pulse of humanity. The last time I had a feeling like I had on that day was right before COVID shut down the nation, sitting a few blocks away at a cafe in Greenwich Village, eating dinner with my brother. My brother and I love each other very much and have never had a fight. This may be partially a result of our age gap, as nearly six years separate us. I am almost as much an uncle as a brother, but I also attribute to a divine source our compatibility of personalities that transcends this material plane.

The news of the pandemic was spreading around the world. As we looked out on the street at dusk, watching Black Suburbans ferrying groups of raucous revelers dressed for a good time, mostly women, I observed, we spoke of our sense that the scene we were witnessing was a final act of sorts. We knew that soon people would not be living in this way, and we were right. The next day I left New York City for isolation in Maryland, fearing what city life might be like with the incoming pandemic, and two days later the lockdown began. My brother joined me in Maryland a week or two later and we remained in isolation for several months. The feeling I had at that dinner with my brother on that evening before the pandemic a few years earlier, the eerie sensation of dark change afoot, was the same feeling I was having while talking to Clyde that day.

Being a personal client of Clyde, the boss, el jefe, or το αφεντικό (Clyde is Greek), grants one the best seat in the house, overlooking the bustling neighborhood of SoHo, my former home. Humans were buzzing along Spring Street, the hippest shopping district in New York and maybe the world. All I could speak to Clyde about was how this would all end soon. I wish I had taken notes on our conversation, or recorded it as a voice memo. It was enlightening.

I can’t recall the particulars but Clyde was skeptical of our (humanity’s) ability to figure out how to work together. The man is more guru than hairstylist, though he is without question one of the best hair stylists in the world. For Clyde, hair is art. Cutting hair is a craft. What Cylde does is most human and transcends our current economic order. That’s why he understands humanity so well, besides the ceaseless conversations with the world’s elite bankers and brokers and models cum class ad wealth ex power. Clyde’s salon is one of humanity’s peaks, hopefully just for now and not for all time. What I pondered was not the future but whether there would be one.

Clyde and I spoke of automation and technology. I remember suggesting to him that he had one of the most stable careers. It will take us longer to develop robots that cut hair than it will for us to replace virtually every knowledge worker with software, and even then, I have a strong suspicion we might prefer that humans cut our hair. Then again a Stoic robot conversing with us about the future would be more knowledgeable than Clyde or any human, with a charm and wit no less learned than our own. We should not doubt that machines can do anything that we can do, except for being us. What will it take to save us?

Clyde agreed that we have to work together, but for all his wisdom, he struggled to grok how. We are so caught up in ourselves and our present way of being. A crisis is as likely to unite as divide us. I asked Clyde if he was worried. He said, “why worry?” Someone must. I do.

At around this time I was preparing to apply to Harvard Divinity School. A year or so earlier a good friend of mine in Austin, TX, a former Harvard psychology PhD student studying under Steven Pinker, suggested that I check out the Divinity School after I mentioned to him that I was trying orient my life around my observation that the world’s biggest problems were spiritual, not material. At the time, I wasn’t quite sure what I meant by that, as spiritual is not easy to define, but to my core, my words felt true. I was puzzled by the suggestion of Divinity School as I was never religious or interested in religion. But I was lost. He insisted that I look into it, and I noted his insistence, ignoring it. Hardly a week later, another friend who was a Harvard Law School graduate, knowing nothing of my previous conversation, also suggested, almost out of the blue, that I go to Harvard Divinity School. Like the previous friend, he had lived with a Divinity School student during his time at Harvard. Both of these are brilliant men. One suggestion might have been a fluke, but two I could not ignore. That day I began to research Harvard Divinity School and I think I immediately knew that they were right, though I couldn’t at that time meaningfully articulate why; it was just a feeling, or a calling, as others say.