from my Substack archives: Cindy Phillips, A skip through 10 July in history, 10 July 2025
I’m not playing the Rolling Stones today, but I might have a little dance around my kitchen later. My trusty bedside pocket trivia book informed me during my customary dawn read that, on this day in 1965, the Stones topped the U.S. charts for the first time with Satisfaction. I was all of 548 days old. I don’t remember my parents dancing in our tiny lounge, but I’d like to think they did. I’m Alive by The Hollies was also topping charts around then, and something in it still makes me come over a bit soft. I love the idea that my parents danced when I was too young to remember it. That their joy prefigured mine.
It’s Proust’s birthday today, which always makes me wonder whether we still allow space for a Remembrance of Things Past, or for going about In Search of Lost Time, or whether our timelines just keep refreshing before anything can sediment enough for the smell of biscuits baking to inspire a classic literary novel.
Should kids still learn about another birthday boy, John Calvin? Some say no. Born on 10 July 1509, Calvin died on 27 May 1564, but his ideas, particularly the doctrine of predestination, have lingered in Western culture for centuries. A key figure in the Reformation, Calvin helped reshape not only religion, but attitudes toward work, authority, and self-discipline. The modern consensus is that he’s out of step with today’s needs. The curriculum is outdated, colonial, irrelevant. Ditch it and teach them how to code. Or let AI answer their ‘Why?’.
But I can’t quite shake the idea that Calvin’s notion of calling – that one’s work has value in and of itself – still hovers in the atmosphere, even when we claim to be done with it. That diligence, frugality, endurance, what used to be called virtue, are still humming in the background of our productivity apps and time-tracking dashboards.
Appropriately enough, it was also on this day in 1962 that Telstar 1 was launched: the first satellite to transmit live television and telephone signals across the Atlantic. The beginning of everything, in a way. As Groucho Marx complained, television brought into your lounge people you’d never have let through the front door. From Telstar to TikTok. Now we consult satellites for weather, and confess to chatbots for spiritual guidance.
Which brings me, naturally, to GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. Ironically, it was a computing term originally; a warning that a program’s output is only as good as its input. But it feels like a broader warning these days. Feed your brain junk, and you’ll eventually think in junk. Scroll long enough and it rewires your discernment. Output is no longer just what we create. It’s how we speak. How we decide. How we vote. What we value.
So what happens when our inputs are algorithmically curated, emotionally manipulative, or just plain wrong? What kind of soul does that produce?
There’s a kind of Calvinist chill to it all. The idea that your fate is decided by the market, the metrics, the machine. That if you hustle hard enough, optimise your schedule, and “show up consistently,” you’ll be rewarded. If not, well, perhaps you aren’t one of the elect.
But I don’t think the old Protestant work ethic ever meant for our value to be measured in clicks. It imagined work as something closer to devotion. A calling. Not a KPI.
These thoughts have been rattling around in my head because I read about a woman last week, proudly declaring that her grandchild doesn’t torment his mother the way she was tormented back in the day. None of that pesky, perpetual “Why?” that erupts the moment a toddler learns to speak. “My daughter just hands him a tablet,” she said, triumphant. “Keeps him quiet all day. She can get on with her life.”
My heart cracked a little, but I said nothing.
And perhaps that’s the point. No need to answer unanswerable questions anymore. No more sticky, endless curiosity. No more innocent interrogation of the world. Just a curated playlist of moving pictures and overstimulating noise to flatten the spikes of early consciousness into something manageable. Containable. Muted cacophany.
GIGO, I thought again. Not with malice, but with a sort of resigned tenderness. Garbage in, garbage out.
It’s hard to remember now that the question “Why?” was once considered a kind of grace; a core memory of a healthy childhood, with scuffed knees, soggy biscuits, and ever-patient answers.
Still, I might put on Satisfaction tonight. And dance, just a little.
Because I’m alive.
“Loss of time is irreparable in eternity.” — John Calvin
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