Yes, the internet, sometimes it's a substitute for company, but I think sometimes I spend a lot of time on the net reading what smart people have written (and there's no end to it) as a kind of substitute for exercising my own creative intelligence. Reading other people's smart stuff pushes a lot of my buttons intellectual-satisfactionwise but not all of them by any means. And that makes it feel like a kind of voyeurism.

Speaking of the net, I guess porn is a good example, in some ways it's very close to something you want, but in other ways it's nowhere near it.