One of the main arguments in the book is that in history the sophists get a very bad shake. The common take is that Socrates beat the rhetoriticians, and science wins out over the humanities.

The authors point though is that “quality” can never be a scientifically found thing. Yet it completely dominates our real experience. Even an amoeba has a sense of quality, in that if you drop alcohol in the Petri dish it will expend all of its effort to get away. Humans have a more complicated and diverse sense of quality. We like rain and sunsets and crackling fire and dogs and right angles and clean sheets.

To me the book is an argument for caring deeply about your own sense of quality. To listen intently to that subconscious and illogical part of you that screams “this is good, that is bad”. All of our intelligence and smarts should be used to better align ourselves with what our body knows is good and bad, not the other way around.

For me, to operationalize this meant becoming sober, working with my hands in the physical world to solve real problems, pursuing/allowing my gay feelings, and trying as hard as I can to take everything in life with grace and humor.

10 years ago I used to be the worst kind of pedantic know-it-all asexual druggie who spent all day inside programming useless things and playing video games. I wasn’t pursuing quality. I was pursuing the comfort of never having to leave my tiny existence. Now I’m doing something else.