Mike Flanagan's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Mr. Hyde is snapped out of it by his daughter (who he has in this version) nobly sacrificing himself so that she and Jekyll can live happily ever after.

Mike Flanagan's The Yellow Wallpaper: the narrator gets to see her baby and is so overcome with love that she recovers and rejoins the family.

Mike Flanagan's The Woman In Black: Arthur manages to reunite Jennet and Nathaniel's ghosts, and they walk off into the sunset together holding hands.

Mike Flanagan's We Have Always Lived In The Castle: Constance and Merricat hug it out.

I don't know your circumstances which does limit how much practical advice I can give. I work a 9-5 office job and I definitely struggle to make time for the things that I care about - namely creative and learning pursuits. Ideally I would be devoting all of my free time to the many things I care about, whether important or just personally meaningful - but that is not my reality for reasons both fair (I work a job that is very emotionally demanding/traumatizing) and unflattering (I am addicted to looking at this microblogging website you may have heard of even though it is mostly quite boring). But that also means I have regular weekends, evenings off, do not deal with sudden "call-ins" or things like that, which is not universally the case.

I do think there's a couple assumptions you're making that might make this more difficult on you. I don't really know what a "baseline level of intellectual and aesthetic cultivation" is, and I think "stupid" is not a term I would apply to anyone that is actually interested in learning. Starting from a position of harsh reflection on yourself is just going to make it harder to cultivate the habits you want. In particular the framing of needing to "fix your shit" or "catch up" assumes that you are behind in some way, it creates a sense of pressure and external invalidation that I think is not just wrong and unfair to yourself but self-defeating. The fact that you experience curiosity and desire to learn things you don't know is already putting you a few steps ahead of the average person and miles ahead of the average American. What's important is that this be something that emerges from you as a *desire* - not as an arbitrary standard you see yourself as already failing to meet.

So with that in mind here are some of the things that I do to try and stay engaged:

1 - I personally try to arrange my time so that every week, even if it won't be every day, I am spending a little time on something that matters to me. That might be practicing a song on guitar, or watching an artsy movie, or reading an article I've been meaning to get around to, or working my way through a shorter book on a free afternoon. Is it "enough"? Well, nothing ever feels like enough, but it is at least something, and it isn't Phone (source of all evil). I have a weekly schedule I use for these purposes, but I think just figuring out where your free time lies, how you can realistically fill it given your time and energy constraints, and setting some goals (I like a mix of "realistic" and "aspirational" goals) can jumpstart you.

2 - I think that doing things with others is frequently really useful. Book clubs, movie nights, museum outings if there's anything interesting in your area, these are all ways of getting intellectual/aesthetic stimulation that are not Phone and that are also fun because you're with people you like or have rapport and a common interest with. For nearly the past two years a few friends and I have been using a group setting to work through various things that we're interested in: Capital Volume I, Frantz Fanon, Revolutionary Girl Utena, and in the fall we're watching Kubrick's filmography. Some other friends and I do a Japanese cinema club (which sometimes dabbles in other non-Anglo cinema). I also personally benefit a little bit from the external pressure of being obligated to others. Plus a diversity of perspective is often more rewarding than solitary monastic reflection.

3 - If finding the motivation is difficult, combining it with something else that you *have* to do in some way can sometimes be helpful. A few examples:

I have been paying for voice training lessons, and I would like to get my money's worth, so I practice. One way I practice is reading works of theory I've been meaning to get around to, or entries in various internet encyclopedias, out loud.

I like to listen to my history podcasts while cooking or doing laundry, stopping to take notes on my laptop along the way. (The tradeoff here is that multitasking divides your attention, though I think the note-taking helps keep me grounded - I think YMMV on striking that balance.)

I am trying to make the habit of not using my phone on the bus and instead reading. I have a few books that are specifically better suited to reading on public transit (books of aphorisms like Beyond Good and Evil or Minima Moralia, or novellas or graphic novels if that's your bag) on rotation.

4 - I think you're putting a lot of emphasis on reading, and while I'm a big fan and defender of reading, it's not the only path towards intellectual stimulation. It might take a little investigating and due diligence, but there are lots of great history and philosophy podcasts, tons of free lecture series on YouTube, documentaries of all stripes. Video essays get a lot of flak for good reason, and like all social media based material I think they have inherent limits to their educational value, but there are some that I think are either interesting in themselves (a lot of Dan Olson's work on high-control groups and tech nonsense) or will at least point you in the direction of more interesting things (e.g. PhilosophyTube, who makes passable edutainment with really excellent bibliographies). Things like that can sometimes be more easily incorporated into a daily or weekly routine. Alternatively, if there's a big tome you want to read, you could pick one for the year or a six-month period (this is what I'm doing with The Second Sex - which I desperately need to start reading again), and maybe explore shorter articles along the way when questions come up, or as preparation ahead of time.

5 - You could always look for a syllabus on a subject you're interested in and basically follow it or tweak it as needed - I've done this before.

6 - If there's someone that I think is intellectually insightful, then when they mention something I don't know, I like to look it up and get a gloss on how it might relate to what they're talking about. I also have tried to work on being less afraid of looking like I don't know something - because there's nothing to be afraid of! We are often more afraid of looking foolish than actually being foolish, but these days I would much rather say "oh I'm not familiar, tell me more" and ask follow-up questions when someone mentions a writer they like or a physics concept or history topic they've been reading up on.

7 - This ties back into what I said first, but don't torture yourself. Slogging through books while feeling totally disengaged, reading stuff because you feel like you're "supposed to," trying to impress other people with how well-read you are, that's not what cultivating these habits is for. That doesn't mean "don't do hard stuff" nor does it mean that secondary sources are substitutes for reading the primary source. But I think part of the process of learning is cultivating a sense of judgment about your own values, tastes, limits, and styles of learning. If there have been times that you felt like you were learning a subject and it went well, maybe you can try and adapt that model or structure in some way to the topic you're taking an interest in.

For instance, I know that I simply don't enjoy reading huge history overviews (stuff that's called like "The Reformation: A History"), it overwhelms my brain and I feel like I am not absorbing the information adequately. So I try to find things to read that are shorter and/or more focused (like, for example, a biography of Luther, or a book on the Peasants' War, or about propaganda and the printing press), and just look for a good podcast or lecture series if I want to learn about that subject in a more "overview" format. That was how I liked learning history in an academic setting: listening to and taking notes on overview lectures in conjunction with reading a focused book.

what's your favourite kitchen appliance?

do you have a collection of anything?

what's the best job you've ever had?

what's the worst job you've ever had?

what's your favourite piece of furniture and where did you get it?

what's your go-to recipe when you want to make something that requires minimal effort?

are you married or do you intend to get married?

do you have kids? do you want them?

are you on good terms with your parents?

do you have siblings? do you hang out with them?

do you vote?

what's the biggest purchase you've ever made?

what are your hobbies?

what's a hobby you'd like to get into?

do you collect anything?

how long have you known your oldest friend?

are you a member of any clubs or associations?

have you ever changed fields in your career or education?

how many wisdom teeth do you have and have you had any removed?

what's your favourite beverage?

do you have any living grandparents?

do you have nieces/nephews/godchildren/other kids in your life that aren't yours?

what's the coolest place you've visited?

what's your most recent degree and has it been useful to you?

would you rather own a dishwasher or a laundry machine if you could only have one or the other?

do you make a list before going to the grocery store or just wing it?

what's your favourite household chore?

what chore do you hate the most?

do you have houseplants and how are you at keeping them alive?

this is not just "a picture", it's Pale Blue Dot, one of the most famous works of astrophotography ever made public. and it was not just "a dying spacecraft", it was Voyager 1, a probe launched in 1977 to study the atmosphere and moons of Jupiter and Saturn, among other things. both Voyager probes carried on them a golden record meant as an introduction to humanity for any alien species that might discover them (if you saw Kane Parsons' Backrooms, you've heard the contents of that record coming out of a cardboard caveman standee). they did this because NASA planned to sundown these probes by letting them drift out of the solar system to parts unknown. Voyager 1 is currently 16 billion miles away, the farthest any manmade object has ever traveled from earth.

AND it's not even dead! despite supposedly being a "dying spacecraft" all the way back in 1990, Voyager 1 is not expected to be fully out of commission until 2036. to keep the probe alive they've switched off unneeded tools, adjusted its trajectory, even essentially updated the firmware, and through all that time it's basically never stopped sending back priceless data for scientists to analyze.

this is the original Pale Blue Dot, by the way:

it's relevant because "a single point of light smaller than one pixel" makes a lot more sense in the context of the original than it does in the heavily corrected version up top, where our pale blue dot looks more like a vibrant dwarf star. the difficulty of spotting earth in these waving curtains of space IS the entire impact of the picture! the blue dot is "pale" because it's hard to see! by making earth stand out so brilliantly, Terribly Interesting have inadvertently created the impression that earth is this vibrant glowing pearl, bright for all to see for billions of miles around. and it just isn't! the point is not that we can see earth from far away, but that we almost can't, because we aren't the center of the universe! when science educators past have used this image they often referred to one where the earth is circled in bright red, which only further emphasizes how small and fragile our home really is.

but hey, if you DO want an improved version of Pale Blue Dot you don't even need photoshop:

this is Pale Blue Dot Revisited, released by NASA in 2020. this is a reinterpretation of the original data using modern image processing techniques to create a more realistic or at least more high-definition rendering of the scene. it's important to understand that this is not the original image dropped into photoshop and airbrushed. strictly speaking, there isn't an "original" Pale Blue Dot the way there are negatives of traditional photography. astrophotography is almost always the product of raw data being deliberately interpreted by scientists, so the same data can produce many different images (ie if they want to emphasize the infrared spectrum vs visible light). similar work was done by Don P. Mitchell in ~2005 to enhance images taken by Soviet Venera probes of the surface of Venus to be less noisy.

here's an original:

and here's Mitchell's version:

i'm not here to argue which is "better" (and i highly recommend you read the source for this one because it's quite fascinating), just to give another example of the process in action and hopefully clarify how it's distinct from editing a jpeg in photoshop. also i just think it's neat!

which is the real reason i went to the trouble of making this post. Terribly Interesting may indeed find all of this to be terribly interesting, but it appears to be interest for the sake of a vague transient feeling of having been interested and little else. it doesn't name the probe, the photo in question, nor does it give historical context for the mission it was part of. the only substantial thing it says about the probe, that Voyager 1 is a "dying spacecraft", is so frustratingly oversimplified it may as well just be a lie.

so what's actually learned here, if you're someone who knows none of this history? that one time there was a thing and it did a thing? earth tiny from far away?? obviously it's just one image macro but i see this kind of thing making the rounds SO often, a screenshot with like two sentences on it explaining the image with as little descriptive text as possible. it's like there's a space-themed inspiration-posting rulebook that says you can't imply the existence of information not contained within the image. mention NASA? mention Voyager 1? mention Pale Blue Dot? nope! "a dying spacecraft" took "one last photograph", and here's a photoshopped version to make earth more visible.

and it might not even get to me nearly as much if this was any other space photo. i could accept that space stuff is complicated and this kind of fast-food image can only say so much if we were talking about Cassini or JWST's role in helping us find exoplanets. but this is Pale Blue Dot, the brainchild of arguably THE science communicator Carl Sagan! he wrote a book about Pale Blue Dot, he was on TV to announce the image personally! it's arguable that no astrophotograph exists whose context has been more digestibly packaged for laymen than Pale Blue Dot, which just makes it that much more egregious when someone doesn't go to the trouble.

so much of what i love about astronomy and studying the past & future of space travel is that everything you can learn is a doorway to learning more. you can't earnestly read about Voyager or Cassini or Venera or any other mission without finding some odd searchable detail and going "wait, what is that" and immediately falling down an hourslong rabbit hole to find an answer. and you'll never reach the bottom! i love reading articles about cutting edge astrophysics written for people in, like, early grad school, because i fully comprehend maybe 10% of it, vaguely understand 20% (on a good day), can kind of wrap my head around 30%, and find the rest totally inscrutable... but that's still a solid 60% scrutability rating even at the lowest-quality end of the spectrum! i'm no expert and i never will be, but in scouring the written expertise of others i almost always find one or two ideas that end up sticking with me forever. and it starts, every time, from questions about a photograph.

the sin of the above image is that it's solipsistic. it doesn't give you anywhere to put your curiosity or interest, doesn't invite you to leave their website and learn more than they have space to share, it doesn't even tell you anything useful about its subject! it reduces the entire history of Pale Blue Dot down to a vague and nondescript wonder that's just a pale imitation of the highly specific and ideologically driven wonder that Carl Sagan wanted us to feel.

here, feel it for yourself:

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