I suppose it is fitting that I come upon one of Montaigne’s most annoying essays when I’m in a general state of irritation.

So much of what’s going on in my life this week is bothering me — people who keep needing my assistance and put me into a state of panic over their crises, then recede into the background and go silent when their lives return to normal. People who speak of a desire for collaboration, but actually just want to use others to elevate their opinions and tastes. My time taken up with “training” I learned 30 years ago.

And there’s also the continuing jab of people who sound so interested in reading what I’ve read but who then don’t bother to follow the links I give them, never mind actually doing the reading and sharing their thoughts about it. It’s best to disbelieve anyone who claims to be interested in anything about your life.

So, all of this is enough, but now to come upon Montaigne criticizing Cicero for being little more than an accomplished orator, without acknowledging that by this point in his project he’s already quoted him at least two dozen times and will continue to do so in essays to come. And then Montaigne criticizes people’s hobbies and skills, as if it’s unworthy of them to do anything more than their primary occupation in life, completely ignoring the fact that these essays are a product of this hobbyist’s drive.

Really, I just want to tell him to shut up here. And then he complains about people who’ve complimented his writing in earlier essays, yuck. The one part of the essay that is valuable to me is where Montaigne admits that he misses La Boetie and would far prefer to have one-to-one conversations with him than to write letters (and by extension, these essays.) That’s a genuine, vulnerable sentiment.

He closes the essay with an explanation of his letter writing style. What it brings to mind for me is the current status of email writing (since letter writing seems to have vanished completely.) I feel like every email I read now has been drafted by AI, and that we all might as well link our AI chatbots together and let them pretend communicate on subjects we apparently care so little about (or perhaps it’s just the people we no longer care about.)

This recalls a joke by Slavoj Zizek about the ideal date in the age of online dating, where men and women should just bring their sex toys to meetings and let them join together in mechanical copulation while couples sit in their detached discussions about whatever trivia their dating coaches have advised them to bring up. I’d go it a step further from Zizek and suggest that the dating coaches just hold the conversations as well, so the couples can go back to scrolling Instagram and cyberstalking the people who they wish were actually sitting across from them on the dates.