Three things arrived simultaneously this week that, taken together, feel like a cultural argument nobody planned to make. Gregg Araki told The New Yorker that he worries Gen Z isn't having enough weird, risky, heart-destroying sex and experiences, that the managed life is the unlived life. Sheila Heti published a story about the mystery of lust, how it arrives without explanation and resists narrative framing. And Lauren Michele Jackson wrote about Kylie Minogue's "Padam Padam" as a song that divides the people who feel it physically from those who process it intellectually. The partition is the point.
The Managed Life vs. the Felt One
Araki's film, "I Want Your Sex," is arriving at a moment when platform design has made desire legible and therefore somewhat predictable. Recommendation engines know your type before you do. Dating apps have gamified attraction into a swipe. Araki is arguing for the irrational encounter, the one the algorithm would have filtered out. Heti's fiction goes further: her story suggests that lust is meaningful precisely because it precedes understanding. It is, in the vocabulary of affect theory, a pre-cognitive charge. A 2019 paper in Emotion by Lench et al. found that intense unexpected emotional experiences, including those categorized as lust or infatuation, generate significantly more durable memory encoding than anticipated ones. The algorithm's optimization removes the surprise that makes things stick.
Padam Padam, Somssi, and the Body That Knows First
Jackson's reading of "Padam Padam" as a somatic dividing line connects to Helen Rosner's review of Somssi, a restaurant in Greenwich Village that works through restraint and refuses to optimize for virality. The restaurant, the song, the fiction, and the film all propose the same thing: some experiences must be felt before they can be understood, and the platforms that pre-sort experience by preference are doing something quietly corrosive to the part of us that needs to be surprised. Soleio's argument that humans no longer have a monopoly on taste cuts against this: if AI can anticipate desire, the question becomes not whether algorithms can feel but whether feeling requires the possibility of being wrong.