Enraged by Irritations: Human Nature Or Aristocratic Problem?

I don't know if you've read The Leopard -- the 1958 book by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa that tells a story of social change and the decline of the nobility in 19th-century Sicily through the narrative of the Salina family and its patriarch Don Fabrizio.

I love The Leopard. I love the sensuality of the narrative and of Don Fabrizio himself. I love the way Don Fabrizio admires and supports his nephew Tancredi, even though Tancredi represents the decline of the Salina's social class. I love the way that Don Fabrizio's real interest, and true comfort, lies in astronomy and mathematics.

At one point in the story, Father Pirrone - a priest who lives with the Salina family -- is asked to reflect on what the aristocrats think about then coming shifts in social equality. And he tries to answer, he gets caught up in a long and rambling response because he doesn't know how to explain how the nobility see the world and how different it is.

In trying to express the incomprehensibility what the nobility care about and what they don't, he says "I've seen Don Fabrizio get quite testy, wise and serious though he is, because of a badly ironed collar to his shirt; and I know for certain that the Prince of Làscari didn't sleep for a whole night from rage because he was wrongly placed at one of the Viceroy's dinners."

Encountering that passage always gives me a shock of recognition in an uncomfortable way. Because I, too, am frequently thrown by small irritations. I went through a phase where if I was chopping vegetables and a small piece of something would fall on the floor, I would flip out, feel the world was against me. The problem of price stickers leaving sticky residue on elegant objects sends me into a tailspin. Sometimes I get dressed to go out, and realize my shoes won't work with the weather, and realize my outfit won't work with different shoes, and I get a complete feeling of despair come over me. Yesterday morning, my clothes hangers got tangled up and I was like OK, that's it, we're done.

I don't think I'm alone. I've seen friends in a rage because of coffee spilled on a shirt, or a glass dropped on the floor.

I used to buy into the orthodoxy of "underlying mood": that this kind of thing happens because there is an undercurrent of stress and anxiety so intense that the seeming OKness of the surface is a superficial layer, a paint job over roiling chaos. Sometimes that's true. You can always describe it that way if you want to. But often it doesn't feel that way to me. To me, it feels more like a plunge into the essential pointlessness and harrassingness of human existence, a plunge caused by the irritation itself, not requiring unusual life stress as a background condition.

At first, I was inclined to draw the conclusion that Father Pirrone's association of this experience with aristocracy was questionable. I'm not an aristocrat, and neither are my friends. But then I started wondering if maybe just being middle-class and white in North America was a kind of experience of aristocracy -- I mean, that the relevant background needs and social comforts are met at such a high general high level that our idea of what is a "problem" would be more similar to that of the Salina family than to the non-aristocrats of 19th century Sicily.

But then -- "on the third hand," as my mother liked to say -- I got to thinking, maybe Father Pirrone is wrong about it after all -- because what does Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa know about it? He was the last Prince of Lampedusa and owner of a hereditary agricultural estate. He has no special insights into whether being enraged by irritations is a special aristocrat thing or more a general human thing.

I used to have a lot less money than I do now, and for a time I was in difficult circumstances. I've been trying to remember whether I was just enraged by small irritations then as I am now. But I can't quite sort it out. In my mind's eye of that time, I'm just smoking a lot of cigarettes. I do remember that when I worked as a waitress, one of my tasks was to break cold feta cheese into crumbled feta cheese with my hands, and I hated the feeling so badly, I swore I'd never do that by choice. To this day, I use a knife to chop feta into little cubes.

So: enraged by irritations: human nature or aristocratic problem? I'm really not sure. Or -- maybe it's just me?

My 400-Mile Public Transit Experience: A Multifaceted Analysis

Last weekend I went to a conference at Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. Because I've been learning about the contribution that flying makes to climate change, I decided to travel to the conference by alternative means. Here is my story.

The trip:
I took a train from Kitchener, ON to Windsor, ON leaving around 7:15 on a Thursday after class, changing in London, and getting to Windsor around midnight. I stayed over in Windsor, then got up Friday and took the cross-border Detroit-Windsor tunnel bus. I got off that bus and walked about 20 minutes to the Detroit bus station, then at 1:05 pm I got on a Greyhound that got into South Bend around 6:30 -- which should have been time for exercise but which I took to be time for wine and food and rereading Lucky Jim at one of the seventeen Irish themed pubs nearby.

The conference was all-day Saturday and in the morning, Sunday. Then I did basically the same thing in reverse, except I took a taxi instead of the tunnel bus and I had to catch the train from Windsor at 5:30 Monday morning.

The transit experience:
The main thing about the transit experience is wtf is with putting train and bus stations way out in the middle of fucking nowhere? To get to the Detroit station you walk past blocks and blocks of concrete and fences and nothing. There's no coffee or food in the station, or visibly near the station (though I did use Apple Maps to make my way eventually to "King Coney" Coney Island Diner which turned out to be awesome). Right, because what long distance bus traveler needs food or coffee?

I thought Detroit was bad, but then the South Bend bus station is at the airport. Literally -- it is inside the airport. Thus forsaking, for no gain, the main benefit of public transportation, which is that you normally don't have to make some special trip in some special expensive taxi or something to get to the station, because in a normal city, normal people put the station in the middle of the city where the people are.


I realize the aim is to optimize. And that the little bus-taking needs of little bus-taking people just don't add up to anything. But come on -- it's supposed to be a station, not a distribution center. We are people, not boxes of Cheerios.

The personal experience
The main thing about the personal experience was the number of small exchanges I had with people that involved small exchanges of generosity and how surprisingly life-affirming that was. On the bus to South Bend, a woman asked me for a mirror, revealed that she didn't have a phone, then ... I don't want to tell her story even anonymously, but let's just say it turned out she was on her way to a different city for one of those things you do when nothing else in your life is remotely working in any way. She needed to call a place, she needed to transfer prescriptions. We chatted and I loaned her my phone. And she called the place and talked to the people. And she called Walgreens. And then she called her friend. And by the end of the trip the planning and the prescriptions were all sorted out.

In South Bend someone let me share a cab at the very last minute, after a hotel concierge said to me slowly "We find Lyft and Uber are fastest. Don't you have Lyft and Uber?" In Detroit, I went back into the station to use the ATM because the taxi driver was like "Uh, yes cards but I could really use the cash so I could get gas today." I don't know how to describe it, but being able to move cooperatively through these small obstacles with other people made some of the world's other awfulness seem momentarily less bad. And I don't know why driving and flying never seem to have that texture for me, but for whatever reason, they don't.

The pointlessness of the gesture experience
When you take a long bus trip that you could easily have avoided with a pleasant flight from the cute Island Airport via straight shot to Chicago, you have a lot of time to ponder the pointlessness of your choice. People are flying to other cities for destination bridal showers, FFS. I know that in context, my individual sacrifice does not contribute to a solution in any measurable way, and that solving the climate crisis is going to require more than individuals making individual choices.

Still, It didn't feel pointless. Generally, I am disturbed and weighed down by the degree to which for middle-class people on up, the lifestyle leading to climate catastrophe feels so easy and seamless. It freaks me out when I'm in the airport and the easiest thing is to buy heavily packaged snacks and use thirteen single-use plastic containers in a row and pay twenty dollars for a sandwich. I know it is capitalism's job to make me feel this ease, and I bristle. So I found weird small comfort in the idea of a 400-mile trip feeling difficult, like yes, it's a 400-mile trip for a person, which is a difficult thing, and it felt difficult. Plus there were water fountains in all the stations for my reusable water bottle.


More relevantly, it feels to me like between now and some hopeful imaginary future in which things work better, things are going to have to change, and we have to start somewhere changing what we think of as normal activities. Some things I'm not so good at, but taking the bus? As we know, that is often within my wheelhouse.

I've talked to some friends and colleagues about the flying thing, and I got a variety of thoughtful responses, including the idea that individual choices aren't the crux of the matter, which is, in some sense, true. But some people also have said "Well, we're doomed anyway. So." and that one I have trouble with. I mean, yes, probably. But even if that is true in the long run, doesn't it matter whether the coastal cities are flooded in 50 years rather than 30? Or whether kids who are five now get a reasonable world when they're 50? Isn't a slightly less bad climate crisis better than a slightly worse one?

I haven't stopped flying, and I'm going to fly to California to see family, a trip that seems non-negotiable to me in terms of having a life because I love them and need to see them. But I'm taking the advice to make each trip count, and I'm going to do more things there and see more people. Partly this will involve a roughly twelve-hour transit trip from the Bay Area to SoCal. I'm checking out the Flix Bus. I'll keep you posted.

Some Books To Alleviate Holiday Boredom And Dread

For me, inactivity often induces existential angst and the feeling of the pointlessness of life. So I don't do well with blah holidays like New Year's Day, when people tend to laze around eating and watching sports and everything is closed. Maybe you're a bit this way yourself. If so, here are some books you could read -- my favorite novels and memoirs from the last year or two. All highly recommended!

Don't forget: if you want to support alternatives to the dystopian future where Amazon controls the world's reading material, you can always buy these from Barnes and Noble or Indigo.

Rakesh Satyal, Blue Boy
This novel tells the story of a kid named Kiran, of Indian descent, growing up in Ohio, who wants to wear makeup, hang out with girls, and possibly have sex with boys. Not surprisingly, Kiran struggles to find a way to fit in to his world. Funny and sad, but mostly funny.

Paul Beatty, The Sellout
It's almost impossible to describe The Sellout, as people have been discovering since it won the Man Booker prize and all kinds of other things. It's a satirical commentary on modern culture and modern America and modern race relations, told through some very .. unlikely plot elements, like a black hero who gets in trouble for trying to bring back segregation and slavery. Hilarious and biting.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer
The "sympathizer" in question is a a half-French, half-Vietnamese communist double agent at the end of the Vietnam War, who travels to the US ostensibly alongside US-supporting Vietnamese but secretly reporting back to his communist allies in Vietnam. I don't usually read the Q and Y type things at the end of books, but I did with this one, and the author said this one brilliant and fascinating thing. Usually, he said, books about colonized places written for the west fall into this trap of explaining the culture of the colonized place to the imperialist listener; this serves to flatten and misrepresent it. By having his narrator travel to the US and report back, he was able to fill his book with the opposite: explanations of US culture to outsiders. An amazing book.

Paul Murray, The Mark and the Void
About modern banking and everything else wrong with the world. We've already covered it in detail.

Riad Sattouf, Arab of the Future
Graphic memoir by an author who is half French and half Syrian, about growing up in Libya, Syria, and France, but also about the terrifying helplessness of childhood no matter what is going on.

Trevor Noah, Born a Crime
This memoir by the host of The Daily Show was so much better and more interesting than I thought it would be. Noah grew up in South Africa as a mixed race kid when it was literally illegal for people of different races to have sex and children. The book is about life under apartheid, complicated family relations, and being an awkward teenager. Also, it explains many things you probably didn't know, like why people sometimes name their kids "Hilter" in South Africa. Funny and sad, in equal measure. There is also violence, including domestic violence, so be careful to read this in the proper frame of mind.

Tarquin Hall, The Vish Puri detective series
If you're looking for something lighter and less serious than the other books listed, check out this serious about an Indian crime-solving detective. These books are entertaining and also contain many small interesting details about Indian food, politics, culture, corruption, family life, spirituality, language, history ... you name it. I had assumed the author was Indian, and when I discovered that he's a guy of British and American ancestry who grew up in the UK I was surprised, and honestly a bit disturbed -- it just seems different when this kind of culture commentary comes from an outsider. But Tarquin Hall lives in Delhi, and is married to an Indian woman, and the end of this interview at least suggests his novels are popular with readers in India.

Happy New Year, everyone!

A Few Philosophical Reflections On Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

I just finished reading Sam Quinones's astonishing book Dreamland. Dreamland tells the story of the story of America's recent opiate epidemic, but it is also about a million other things like modern American culture, the ethics of health care, late capitalism, the role of government, the nature of pain, and the timeless dilemma of human existence: can you make things better for people without also, somehow, making them worse?

This post isn't an overview of important themes from Dreamland. For that you'll have to read the book. And you should read the book. If you're not sure, start by listening to the author talk about it on the WTF podcast or check out more info here.

Anyway, this is just a discussion of a few things I personally found philosophically interesting, relevant, and thought-provoking.

1. Philosophy of science: evidence and social epistemology

One of the central aspects of the epidemic was the sudden rise in prescriptions for opioid pain relievers and particularly Oxycontin. For a long time it was part of health care orthodoxy that opioids are highly addictive and thus dangerous, and so should only be prescribed in special circumstances like after surgery or when someone is near death. But Oxy tried to change all that.

Oxycontin was formulated as a time-release pill made up of the opioid oxycodone intended to eliminate the euphoria and make the drug non-addictive. It is not surprising that Oxycontin was aggressively marketed as non-addictive: in the nature of things, the makers of the drug stood to make more money the more it was prescribed, and this is what companies do.

What is surprising, and indeed utterly shocking, is how many people went along with it -- with a belief that challenged everything they thought they knew -- on the basis of virtually no evidence. Doctors believed it, med school profs started to teach it, massive health care decisions were made on its basis. And, of course, it turned out to be wildly false. So: what the hell?

As with so many things, it turns out that the answers are complex. The drug arrived in the middle of a shift away from thinking of pain as something to be endured no matter how awful and toward thinking of pain as something that ought to treated. That shift probably would have been a good thing, except that at the same time, insurance companies didn't want to pay for the multidimensional treatments known to help with pain. The producers of Oxy spent a fortune conducting huge conferences that trained drug reps and reinforced the message.

These reps were trained to cite, as evidence, a text known as "Porter and Jick." This text, which was refereed to as a study and sometimes described as a large or important study, was supposed to show that opiods aren't so addictive after all. But Porter and Jick isn't a study at all. In fact, it turned out to be a one-paragraph letter to the editor, written in 1980, to the New England Journal of Medicine, in which a doctor with a taste for data wrote out an informal observation of patients at the hospital where he worked. Not only wasn't it a study, it described patients in a highly controlled environment receiving drugs before the rethinking of pain treatment was underway.

No one questioned "Porter and Jick" -- at least for a long time. People shared the info, passed it along. Quinones points out that everyone thought everyone else had read it; before the journal archives were put online in 2010, finding out what Porter and Jick really was would have required going to the library and looking it up -- something doctors just didn't have time to do. Interestingly, when I tried to use PubMed to view Porter and Jick, I saw the image at the top of this post -- no associated abstract even! -- and Google Scholar offers only a citation. It is still not an easy text to find!

Don't you find it profoundly disturbing that people can cite something crucial, and build on it, and teach it, and share it, without really knowing what it is? I do. And yet, I expect that this -- or something like it -- happens a lot. We know that science proceeds in a highly social way, and that scientists trust one another. People appropriately subject some beliefs to much more crucial scrutiny than others, because they are relying on a sense of what is, and isn't, already known and what is, or isn't, important to revisit. You couldn't require everyone to check everything going back all the way at every stage, or nothing would move forward. It's complicated.

Of course, when it comes to actual pharmaceuticals, you could build in specific checks on things. This article points out that the current US scheme -- in which advertising has to be submitted to, but not reviewed by, the FDA before it can be used -- is a big part of the problem.

2. Capitalism and philosophy of economics

The story of the opiate epidemic is, in some ways, the story of capitalism going where capitalism had never gone before. If you leave out the "people dying in droves" problem, the story of Oxy is a story of business success. And Dreamland describes how a guys from one town in Mexico create a kind of pizza-delivery model for black tar heroin, where you call and there's a guy, and there's quality control and customer service and so on.

I'm constantly trying to convince people that economics is not value-free: that our definitional choices affect our conclusions, that this process is not value-neutral, that assumptions about what is and is not important are hidden behind seemingly objective principles.

The opiate situation is a perfect illustration. The story we always hear about capitalist exchange is that when A and B  make a voluntary transaction, overall well-being improves: since A and B are both getting what they prefer, they are both better off.

As Adam Smith well knew, this is true only in certain contexts and against certain backdrops, and ethical questions and economic ones are deeply intertwined. If you allow that people buying Oxy and black tar heroin, becoming addicted, and often dying is a "bad thing," then you immediately face several deep questions: How is this exchange unlike others? What is the theory of "well-being" in which Coca-Cola makes you better off but Oxy doesn't? What is the theory of "voluntary" that makes addiction incompatible with free choice?

In her wonderful 1962 book Economic Philosophy, the economist Joan Robinson uses the example of addiction to showcase the problems with the standard economic view in which the theory of revealed preferences -- whatever the person chose must, tautologically, be what they wanted -- comes together with the theory of well-being as preference-satisfaction -- whatever the person preferred must, tautologically, have been what would improve their well-being.

"But [addicts] should be cured," she writes, "[and] children should go to school. How do we decide which preferences should be respected and what restrained unless we judge the preferences themselves"

Sure, highly addictive drugs are an extreme example. But you can't rule them out without a some thinking about what preferences matter and why, that is, about what is good for people and what isn't. And once you're going down that road, well -- pretty soon you're asking what is a good life and what matters and why. You're far from rational choice theory and revealed preferences, and there's no telling where you'll end up.

3. Is the human experience essentially a pain?

When it comes to the pains of human existence, there are two types of people in the world. There are people who think things are naturally OK and only become fucked up when bad things happen, and there are people who think that the human experience itself is essentially a problem. In case you haven't noticed, I'm the second type.
   
In Dreamland, Quinones talks about the dilemma of all attempts to kill pain: can you have the heaven of pain-killing without the hell of addiction? The thing I'm talking about is related to that but goes beyond pain and pleasure into general human existence questions.

As the opiate crisis deepened, many of the people who got addicted were young privileged white people from well-to-do families -- kids growing up in leafy suburbs, with their own bedrooms and cars and TVs and so on. In some cases they started because of sports injuries, but a lot of them were just looking for a good time.

If you think things are naturally OK and become fucked up only when bad things happen, it seems difficult to explain these kids deciding to take drugs. Why take those risks? For what? But if you think human existence is naturally difficult, exhausting, irritating, and boring, it makes all the sense in the world. People are constantly trying to escape their own consciousness, and they always have.

What this ultimately shows, I think, is that while freedom and autonomy are wonderful things, desires don't just come out of nowhere, and most people aren't going to do very well when left alone to their own devices.

Despair In Art, Philosophy, and Life; Or, Schopenhauer Goes To The Movies

I loved the movie Anomalisa, so I was very happy when my friend sent me a link to this piece by Zadie Smith in The New York Review of Books.

I was especially happy because people kept asking me, "What's that movie about?" and I didn't have an answer. The plot has to do with a middle-aged man on a business trip who meets a young woman -- but when I say that people are like, "Oh it's about a hook-up?" and I'm like, "No, it's not about a hook-up." I considered saying it's about the human condition, but I thought that would be too ridiculous.

Now Smith has some ideas. It's about being "stuck between those twin poles of want and boredom." It's about the "horrors of the will" -- the endless endlessness of being ourselves -- broken only by moments of aesthetic contemplation. It's about loneliness. And it's all done with puppets. Did you know that it's all done with puppets?

Smith happened to see the movie with a philosopher friend, and she analyzes the movie through the lens of Schopenhauer's philosophy. I know almost nothing about Schopenhauer, beyond tiny things bordering on caricature. Dark sort of guy. Didn't like women. Down on love.

Smith quotes quite a lot from Schopenhauer, thus giving me a glimpse into his philosophy and a chance to see Anomalisa's themes in philosophical language. It goes something like this:

"Desiring lasts a long time, demands and requests go on to infinity; fulfillment is short and is meted out sparingly. But even the final satisfaction itself is only apparent; the wish fulfilled at once makes way for a new one."

To which my first thought is "Well -- yeah. I know that. I've known that forever. I think about it every time I see a two year old crying. "Welcome to the human condition, kid. I'm sorry it's like this!"

And to which my second thought is "Wait, what the hell am I doing with my life? I mean, what am I doing as a philosopher?"

Because this happens to me pretty regularly. I experience something in art or literature and feel all emotional and connected and I read the same ideas in philosophy and it seems completely cold and dull and inert.

So WTF am I doing? This is a thought I've had before, many time. A lot of philosophers, I find, say that they really love philosophy. But I've never really felt that. I'm often ambivalent about philosophy. I often find it dull and lifeless. I often find it annoying. Or, as I put the problem in this interview at the APA blog:

"My most favorite thing about philosophy is also my least favorite thing: the way philosophy allows you to abstract away from the contingencies of our world. On the one hand, this is wonderful, because it allows us to take a fresh perspective and imagine realities different from our own. On the other hand, too much abstraction and philosophy becomes useless, inert, and disconnected from anything that matters."  

Over time and with the help of friends I've developed talking points for myself about why I'm doing what I'm doing. Basically it's like this. I like to think about things. I find my style of thinking is particularly well-suited to the style of philosophy. It comes pretty naturally for me. I believe that in the grand scheme of things that philosophy has some really useful and important things to contribute to understanding the world. So: it's worth doing; I'm pretty good at it; I might as well do it.

As I rehearsed the talking points to myself after reading Smith's piece, I started thinking about different kinds of philosophy and about the fact that the kind of philosophy I do has very little overlap with the kind of philosophy in Schopenhauer.

There are some very complex reasons for this having to do with philosophy in Anglo-American culture and its institutional development, but there are also simpler more personal reasons. For me, those simpler more personal reasons have to do with the fact that despair, boredom, the human conditions and the meaning of life aren't things I find I can understand better by thinking about them. In fact, thinking about them gets me nowhere and makes me feel awful.

I don't know if you've ever had that experience, where you start to feel like What's The Point, and then you get into that weird delusionary mood-moment where you think that maybe, if you had some quiet time for reflection, you might possibly move forward on this question in way that makes your life better?

And then you sit and think about it, and not only do you not feel better, you really feel much worse, because not only have you put yourself face to face with the fact that there really is no point, and that awful things are going to keep happening, and that even good things are going to be disappointing -- now also instead of having those thoughts in the course of normal activities you're having them during some "quiet time for reflection" -- which makes them seem darker and more grim and more horrible.

That is partly why, while I have nothing against the philosophical study of despair and the human condition, it's not the kind of thing I'd ever work on. In fact, it's not the kind of thing I want to read other philosophers writing about.

I'm happy to leave contemplation of such matters to people like Charlie Kaufman, who had the brilliant and utterly original idea to explore the problem through stop-animation puppetry.

In any case, I knew Anomalisa would make me feel sad and maybe even despairing, so I'd planned ahead for the activities following the movie: I had a martini, with someone I love, in a crowded bar. We talked about the puppets, and I tried not to think too hard about what it's like to be alive.

Against Applied Rationality, Or, Please Respect The Elephant

Pietro Longhi, 1701-1785, The Elephant, via Wikimedia Commons

I spend a lot of time in a somewhat eye-roll-y state of mind, and sometimes I wonder: are the things and people of this world really as stupid and annoying as I tend to think they are? Then I come across things like the Applied Rationality Seminar and I know I can rest assured: no, I've pretty much got it.

This essay in yesterday's New York Times has all the details. You spend four days and nights "on site," in overcrowded dormlike conditions, mostly with other highly motivated Bay Area 20-somethings, doing exercises designed to free you from your irrationality. Only $3,900 per person.

Obviously, I'm not so churlish as to deny someone a leg up with dealing with procrastination or obsessive Facebook checking or whatever. Knock yourselves out. But as so often with these kinds of things, it's never about small improvements in your existing life. It's always some kind of messianic and all encompassing drive -- like it's the boot camp for The Singularity or something.

I can never quite get what these programs are getting at, because I can never grasp what end point the people are aiming toward. I mean, if rationality is just taking appropriate steps to satisfy your preferences, then who's to say "checking Facebook" or "sitting on the sofa" isn't your true preference rather than "work" or "going to the gym"?

They give the example of someone who wants a PhD but doesn't want to "work on it." Well -- if you don't want to work on it, wouldn't it be just as rational to, um, not work on it? To form some other goal instead?

The people who run the workshops take pains to show that they're not anti-emotion, talking about the idea of two systems that can sometimes run in tandem and sometimes run in different directions. It's "like a monkey riding an elephant." The monkey is the "intellectual, goal-setting" part, and the elephant is the "emotional, instinctive" part. When they're not in harmony, trouble ensues.

Sure, I get that. And yes, when there's disharmony between the monkey and the elephant, there's no question there's going to be trouble. But they talk about it like the elephant is some kind of idiot -- at best giving you a bit of intuitive edge to see things you might have missed otherwise, but otherwise there to be nudged and guided in the appropriate way.

So what I don't get is: Who died and made the monkey headmaster?

When people talk about "who they are," they often come up with things like "loving parent," "caring spouse," "Chicago Bulls fan," or "Star Wars obsessive." These things are all about caring and liking. Aren't they all from the elephant? So why when we're getting down to it do we suddenly act like "Oh, monkey needs help! He can't steer the elephant! Monkey needs a workshop on elephant management. Only $3900 per person.

While it is true that some of the exercises are about getting clearer on what your goals are, all the techniques mentioned seem to involve introspection and thought experiments -- basically more thinking about what you are thinking. All these years of people shouting that Descartes was wrong because the self isn't identical to the thinking self -- and where have they gotten us?

One reason I think people side with the monkey is that in the background, there are lurking ideas about "productivity" and "getting things done." And especially in this group, the idea seems to be that when you get unstuck, you'll be able to harness the power of your emotional self for doing "important things." One guy, when confronted with the possibility that there are other things beyond productivity -- like happiness, and other people -- is dismissive:

"I want to augment the race," he says. "I want humanity to achieve great things. I want us to conquer death."

Oh brother. Much as I'd love to be immortal, it's hard for me to count not-living-forever among the pressing problems of the human race. Plus, is this really intended to convey that ordinary people like this guy should stop wasting a few minutes here or there online and make sure to get to work so they can ... do what exactly? Make an app? Move some money around?

Maybe there are people whose activities are important enough to be maximized. Maybe people inventing solutions to the climate crisis. Or trying to stop wars. Maybe health researchers? Actually I think those people are already really productive, and according to articles like this, the way to improve things like health care is to stop pushing productivity and start to care about love.

Look, maybe you do need to change your life. If you're constantly undermining yourself, if you're a diabetic and you can't eat right and take your meds, if you're drinking yourself to death and you can't stop, if you keep lashing out in anger at the people you love -- yes, your elephant is in trouble, and you might want to change, and you might need help doing so.

But as we all know from living on Earth among humans (and as Atul Gawande has been reminding us lately), mostly people change because of other people -- other people taking an interest, talking to us over and over, nagging occasionally, and caring what happens.

It's basically the polar opposite of a highly individualized workshop teaching you to look inside yourself for the powerful answers within. 

Philosophy Of The Post-Apocalypse: Station Eleven Edition

Over the break I read this excellent post-apocalyptic novel, Station Eleven. Unlike a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction, this book really got to me -- in the sense of making me feel I should learn some post-apocalyptic-appropriate skill like fighting or sewing, and also in the sense of making me feel like somehow the apocalypse is realistically right around the corner.

I think the reason this book made me feel its reality so effectively is because it is .. well, completely realistic. It's not about some weird future world. It's about what our total actual world would be like if an awful contagious and fatal disease killed 99 percent of people and everything completely collapsed.

Like a lot of dystopian novels, this one is pretty philosophical. Partly because it involves a pandemic instead of a man-made oh-we-brought-this-all-on-ourselves, it goes beyond some of the more obvious cheap-shots at humankind that dystopian novels can sometimes take.  

Yes, this post has spoilers. But in a book where the apocalypse happens at the beginning, it hardly matters, does it? So: in no particular order, a few themes from Station Eleven.

1. The post-apocalyptic future is not a future of moral clarity.

I am so sick of narratives involving good guys and bad guys, where the whole story is about good and evil and how evil people do evil things and good people try to stop them. Not only is this a completely inaccurate representation of our world of moral complexity, I think it's turning a lot of people into moral morons. You're with us or against us! We'll bomb them back into the stone age! You can't let the terrorists win!

Only a citizenry stuffed to the gills with Star Wars Death Star Good Versus Evil simplicity could be sold this sort of black and white vision of the world. In Station Eleven, some good people have to do some pretty awful things, and the bad people -- well, even the main hero of the book is like, "Who knows why? I bet they saw some awful things."

2. Civilization is kind of a human miracle.

Sometimes in modern life civilization seems so inevitable, so part of the landscape, you can almost forget it about how surprising and miraculous it is. Over and over in this book the characters who survive and make their way through the empty world marvel at the leftover remnants of the civilized world, and especially at the way that world was a world of people.

At one point one of the characters muses that we tend to think of the modern era as somehow depersonalized, when in fact it's people who do everything to keep it moving along. The pandemic doesn't destroy any of the material world -- it just kills people. But without people, there's no one to fix the grid, there's no one to make anything or move anything around -- the whole world just comes to a complete standstill.

At one point one of the characters beholds a snowglobe. On the one hand, it's just a trite object from an airport gift shop. But on the other hand, it's an object that represents massive global interaction: someone to design the object, someone to make and assemble it, someone to package it in a box, someone to put it on a container ship to somewhere.

This crazy sense of a world of billions of people coordinating their actions --without which we're just a bunch of scared bipeds trying to shoot deer for food.

3. The everything-happens-for-a-reason-people are going to kill us all.

One of the biggest dangers of the post-apocalyptic world is prophets and cults -- the people who believe that their connection to the deep meaning of it all gives them license to threaten, dominate, and kill others. One of the scariest prophets in the book is someone who was about eleven years old when the pandemic strikes, and whose mother always taught him that "everything happens for a reason." He naturally infers that the saved were saved because the are the special people. 

Well- meaning citizens try to explain to him that no -- in this case it's just germs, and they got some people and not others, there really isn't any deeper meaning to it. But, post-apocalyptic moods being what they are, he doesn't really buy it.

The main story line of the book follows a traveling symphony that goes around in rusted out vans pulled by horses, playing classical music and also performing Shakespeare. Their motto is "Survivial is not enough" -- a slogan they got from an old Star Trek episode. They're always a bit baffled by the point of what they're doing, and whether it's pointless to perform Shakespeare instead of something more suited to their strange condition.

I loved the way they were muddling through, confused, uncertain, and just trying to do something. It seemed to me the opposite perspective to everything-happens-for-a-reason, more like Who-the-hell-knows-what's-going-on-and-why? It might be hard to see the Forces of Uncertainty as the Forces of Good, but I think surprisingly often, they are.

Diagnosis: Hypersobriety. Or, What's So Bad About Self-Medicating?

I love to drink. I drink more is recommended by the medico-establishment powers that be, but I think in 2015 that's not the shocking thing. The shocking thing is that I don't really worry about it too much.

There are several reasons I'm not in a moral panic about my own drinking. For one thing, I used to have a wide range of bad habits and I've managed to quit almost all of them. Even Diet Coke, which I love and regard as the pinnacle of human taste perfection, I haven't had in about five years. Really, you can't expect a person to give up everything.

For another thing, I suffer zero noticeable bad effects from my drinking. I never have a hangover or feel bad, and pace the omnipresent freak-out over "relationship problems," my loved ones agree: drinking makes me, if anything, kinder, happier, warmer, more patient, and more fun.

Also, and as I've written about before, I feel like drinking makes me more me. A better version of me. I don't know if you remember that book Listening to Prozac, from the early 90s? The author, Peter Kramer, argued that some patients on anti-depressants experience a sense of being more themselves. The widespread fear that psycho-pharmaceuticals always make you less you is wrong, just a prejudice, based on some implicit mistaken metaphysics of personal identity.

Listening to Prozac quotes one patient as saying that being on Prozac makes them feel "Unencumbered, more vitally alive, less pessimistic" -- and when I read that I was like, "Yes!" That's how drinking makes me feel. Without drinking, I tend toward sadness and low life-force. When I stop for a while, I run into trouble: my mind gets filled up with stuff, clogged with emotion, the mental equivalent of a hoarder's living room. Drinking, I'm fresh and alive.

Pursuing the medical model analogy, I was thinking about what it is about me that makes this the appropriate treatment, and I noticed that I often have the feeling that two drinks makes me feel normal, well, brought to some imaginary baseline. Feelings of sadness and dread are kept at bay. I was struggling to interpret the underlying feeling. What is this? Anxiety? Depression? Melancholia?

And then it hit me: if drinking is the solution, maybe my problem is just sobriety. I have an excess of it. Hypersobriety. Though there are probably many, this condition has one obvious and natural treatment option: namely, drinking.

The diagnosis actually fits my personality in other ways as well. I'm organized, I don't really procrastinate, and I read books for fun. Plus, I often feel excessively clear-eyed about the world, a characteristic of sobriety that is known to lead to trouble: as we know, self-deceiving, overly optimistic people do well with life while seeing things as they are leads to sadness and depression.

For me, part of being excessively clear-eyed is a deficit in the repression direction. I seem to have trouble blocking out those kinds of facts that, when you're aware of them, get quickly overwhelming. We are all going to die in the not so far away future. And we're either going to die young, or get old. This is going to happen not just to you but to your kids and all the people you love.

The only healthy response to these facts is to frequently repress awareness of them. But if you suffer from hypersobriety -- well, you need a little boost in the repression direction.

I feel like there's a lot of resistance to the use of alcohol and other fun substances to make people feel better. Some of this is based on the very real fact that for a lot of people, using fun substances doesn't work so well in the long run, leading to addiction and other problems. But what about the rest of us? If it's working reasonably well, what's the big deal?

I think a lot of the resistance comes from the idea that self-medicating might come with health risks or side-effects, and this leads to free-rider type indignation, like "OMG, you are doing this thing to make yourself feel better, but that might lead, in some vague and long-term way, to some way in which the rest of us have to pay more to help you down the line. Even though lots of treatments come with other health effects down the line, we'd hate to think that somehow your self-medication might be enjoyable, so that you're somehow having a good time."

But I think this form of indignation is a little overblown and ridiculous. Lots of medical treatments come with downsides and side effects, many of them serious. Just yesterday in the New York Times Ezekiel Emanuel wrote about how astonishingly often more medical care can lead to much worse outcomes. Having the best, most senior cardiac doctors led to more deaths. Stopping medications in elderly patients made them better off.

Again, I'm not denying that in some circumstances self-medication doesn't work. But I don't think the relative frequency of failure justifies the negativity. I guess what I'm saying is, next time you see someone eating a lot of cake or chewing nicotine gum or drinking a lot of Diet Coke or Pinot Grigio or whatever, don't think you have to immediately moralize about it. Maybe overall, it's just the thing they need.

Writing Ruins Everything

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Portrait of a Woman, via Wikimedia Commons

There's a whole school of thought out there that says writing can be a form of therapy: if you experienced something bad or complicated or painful, you can write about it, and this will allow you to process your feelings and move on.

I never thought much about this idea until recently, because -- well, I'm not sure why, but part of the reason is probably that when I feel discouraged or unhappy in a substantive way, it's almost never consciously linked in my mind to something that happened in the past. It almost always takes the form more of general melancholia/what's-the-point/this-goddamn-vale-of-tears and not oh-this-thing-that-happened. Writing about that would just be blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.

I had occasion to think about it recently, though. For reasons having nothing to do with therapy and everything to do with oh-maybe-that-would-be-interesting-and-fun, I took a couple of memoir writing classes through the Gotham Writers Workshop. To my surprise, I found that writing about things made me experience them in a worse way.

For example, for one assignment I wrote a really short piece about how when I see an ambulance rushing somewhere with its siren on, I'm often reminded with a jolt of the night my father had a heart attack, when I was fifteen. Because we lived in a condo complex with complicated intertwined streets, as the ambulance was on its way the suggestion was made that I should walk through the dark quiet streets to the entrance to flag them down and show them the way to the house. And that's what I did.

I wrote about this experience, and I wrote about learning a few hours later that he had died. I wrote about how when I would see an ambulance on its way somewhere, I would often be cast momentarily back to the fear and sadness of that night, and I would picture some other family, waiting for this ambulance, and I would imagine their fear and sadness. I wrote about how I would often then be briefly suspended in time, reminded of the fragility of human life and human happiness.

The teacher liked the piece. She suggested I might submit it to be published, in an online literary forum for very short pieces, after making some revisions. As I made the revisions, I had a mix of feelings. The changes were improving the writing as a piece of writing, but at the same time, I felt like crafting the narrative into the right sort of narrative meant shifting my understanding and perception of what had happened and how it had felt.

Its a recurring problem for me with writing. When it comes to memoir, the shaping of a narrative feels a lot like lying. Every piece I ended up writing for those courses, I felt like I had to turn a series of "well, I don't know, there was this, but there was also that"; things were happening that were unrelated but felt important; who-the-hell-knows-what-is-going-on into some story about How I Changed or What I Learned.

After all that narrative shaping, I felt like I had trouble getting the confusingness of the original memories back. Instead, I had these new memories, organized in a neater, tidier, more standardized, more McMuffin kind of way.

It was like the old messy and less interpreted memories had been overwritten.

After I revised the short piece about ambulances, I submitted it to the forum my teacher had suggested. A couple of weeks later they rejected it. Honestly, when I found out it was rejected, I wasn't as disappointed as I'd thought I'd be -- I almost had a sense of relief that the mood of that piece wasn't a mood I'd be putting out into the world. But still. Being rejected always sucks.

Now when I see an ambulance, instead of thinking about fear and sadness and the fragility of life, I'm reminded instead of writing this piece, and I'm reminded of the experience of having it rejected.

In a way you might think this would be an improvement, replacing a very painful and sad memory with a merely annoying one. But it doesn't feel like an improvement at all. It feels like a total loss.

Philosophical Melancholia

Albrecht Dürer, Melancholia I, via Wikimedia Commons

Though I am, overall, a much happier person than I was when I was young, as an adult I've experienced a a lot of what I like to think of as melancholia. By melancholia I mean some mix of sadness, low life force, discouragement, and a feeling of "Oh, whatever, what's the point."

I suppose my melancholia bears some relationship the modern problem we think of as depression, but I don't think they are the same thing. I don't have any of the typical symptoms always mentioned in connection with depression. I have an excellent appetite; I sleep well and exercise a lot; I get things done and with most things I'm not even really a procrastinator. If I go through an internet depression quiz/checklist, it might say that if you check six out eight boxes checked that's a warning sign -- but I'll have only checked one box: the one that says "I feel sad, like life has no point."

To me, nothing captures this feeling better than Albrecht Dürer's 1514 engraving, "Melencolia I," at the top of this post.

Because my rise in melancholic feelings seems to correlate with the time I've spent studying philosophy, I've often wondered if there is something about philosophical thinking -- or about a certain kind of thinking, more broadly -- that encourages melancholia.

And I think in my own case, anyway, the answer is yes. In fact, I think there are direct causal connections between my thinking philosophically and my feeling melancholic. I'm sure the mechanisms are complex, but here are a few thoughts.

One difficulty, for me at least, seems to be the effect of constantly forcing myself to take a perspective from which I am at best just one person among others and at worst a speck in the universe. I don't mean the kind of destabilization you get looking at the stars or something -- it's not, I think, the mere fact of being unspecial relative to everything else, it's more the shift in perspective of caring, of thinking about what matters or what is important.

For example, like most people, I'd expect, I have the experience that from within my life, the little things that make up my little world assume huge significance and importance to me. Relationships, intellectual projects, of course -- but even things like how should I wear my hair, whether to see a movie, whether to cook or go out to eat, whether I should try harder to learn French -- absorb my mind, fill it up, tie me to life.

But even one minute of a certain kind of reflection shows my concerns to be of virtually no importance whatsoever in the grand scheme of things.

Sometimes, they seem worse than insignificant: there are horrible things going on in the world, injustice and suffering, and you're seriously thinking about hairstyles, movies, and treats?

Other times, they seem like mere moves in a massive social scheme that has little to do with me or what I might "choose" or not choose to do. Probably you've all had this experience: you take one step back from concepts like "hairstyle," "movie" and even "food" -- and you find yourself in a dizzying array of considerations about sexism and beauty norms and Hollywood and glamorization and animal rights and environmentalism and so on and so forth etc. etc. etc.

These are all fine and important thoughts to have. My problem is that in doing philosophy, I form the habits of mind that make that dizzying array not so much a place I visit occasionally to understand the world, but more like my inner mental home. And as an inner mental home, it's horrible. At least for me, it's a profoundly alienating and cold place to spend a lot of time -- like trying to live on the Moon and breathe oxygen through a straw.

Then, too, there's a sense in which philosophical reflection itself often seems to take the form of "what is the point." How ought we to live? Why do this or that? Well -- doesn't this often come to down, "Ultimately, what is the point?"

In some contexts I think this is an OK question to ask. But the problem is that it's a question that, if you're not careful, will spread like kudzu through your days and nights, leaving you staring blankly at the ceiling, trapped in a singularity of philosophical interrogation, until, if you're lucky, you're rescued by friends, or hunger, or some everyday obligation like doing the laundry that just can't be put off any longer.

None of this is to say philosophical thinking isn't necessary, important, and good, because I absolutely think it is. It's just that too much of it might make a person sad, as I think it does me.


If you, too, have the symptoms of philosophical melancholia -- which can, of course, strike anyone at any time -- my advice is: though it might seem tempting, do not try to think yourself out of it.

Just put down the thoughts and walk away.

Sitting Quietly In A Room Alone: It's The Boredom, Stupid!

Gene Wilder, Young Frankenstein

By now I'm sure you've heard about those recent studies that found many people would rather give themselves painful shocks than sit quietly doing nothing. Reading about this research in the popular press, I was like "Can you say Rorschach Test?" It's like everyone who encountered the basic facts had their own spin on how to interpret what happened.

The facts are roughly these: when told to sit quietly alone for 6 to 15 minutes, almost everyone found the experience unpleasant, and many people -- in one case 12 of 18 men and 6 of 24 women gave themselves painful electric shocks rather than just sitting there.

The conclusion in the abstract for the actual scholarly paper says simply, "Most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative."

OK, I admit to being a little bit surprised about the shocks -- but really, is it really news that people find it hard to sit quietly doing nothing? Almost no one ever does this by choice, when people do manage it it's a whole special activity called "meditation," and people who regularly ponder things just in their own minds for long periods of time are considered strange and even sinister. So: how is this a surprise?

After all, it's only been like three-hundred and fifty years since Pascal said that "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

But everyone had their own ideas about the significance of the findings.

The Guardian, and some of the researchers quoted, seemed to emphasize the "being alone with your own thoughts" aspect of the whole thing -- as if it were the thoughts people were having that bothered them, as if people just use activities to avoid thinking about things.

This makes no sense to me. People are constantly thinking about things -- I mean, it's not like brooding and worrying are nineteenth-century activities.  The fact that people want to brood and worry while pacing, listening to stuff, and texting doesn't mean they're not brooding.

Many Guardian commentators wanted to pile on the whole "Kids Today! They Can't Think!" ridiculousness. Yeah -- I'm sure you guys all sit around alone contemplating the mysteries of quantum mechanics all day.

Predictably, The New York Times linked the whole thing up to the OMG modern society is so BUSY we have no time to THINK we're always RUSHING AROUND! As if we're the first generation in the history of the universe that spends a lot of time doing things and talking to other people.

Personally I was astonished that no one mentioned boredom. Isn't it just boring to sit alone with your thoughts doing nothing? I spend a lot of time thinking about things, but I'm almost always reading, typing, writing, talking, listening, drawing, or doing something other thinking-associated activity. Often I'm also doing other activities, like drinking coffee, or looking out the window, at the same time.

The fact that I almost never just sit quietly alone in a room thinking about things doesn't mean I don't contemplate. I contemplate all the fucking time -- I'm a philosopher; I'm stuffed to overflowing with contemplation.

The fact that I almost never just sit quietly alone in a room thinking about things is because sitting quietly alone in a room is BORING.

It might seem like this boredom hypothesis is less exciting or revolutionary than the "people can't be alone with their thoughts" hypothesis, but in my view that's not the case. Because the fact that boredom can make people crazy and self-destructive is a profound and unreckoned with truth.


Often our modern western theory of people sneaks in an assumption that beyond basic needs what people want is best described as pleasure or happiness. It depends on what you mean by those things, of course -- but given the depth of the hatred of boredom, it seems to me that pleasure and happiness are barely scratching the surface.

Interestingly, the Guardian subheadline for the story says "Report from psychologists at Virginia and Harvard Universities tackles question of why most of us find it so hard to do nothing."

But as far as I can tell the report does nothing of the kind. The report tells us HOW EXTREMELY most of us find it so hard to do nothing, but it tells us nothing about WHY most of us find it so hard to do nothing.

In that area, we haven't really made any progress-- we're just back with Pascal, observing the human condition. 

Lifehacking: WTF?

Adriaen van Utrecht (1599-1652), Still Life. Via Wikimedia Commons

You heard about Soylent, right? That new thing where you mix a powder with some oil and some water and you shake it up and it replenishes your body with a mix of nutrients so you can .. um, do all the things people want to do when they can't be bothered to eat food?

You know -- like, Ensure for hipsters?

You can read about it in The New Yorker ("The End of Food"). I guess some young guys were trying to do a start-up thing, and their idea wasn't working out, and they were trying to come up with another idea, and they were eating a lot of ramen, corn dogs, and frozen quesadillas, and eventually one of them thought to himself Ah, If Only We Didn't Have To Eat. Food seemed like "a system that’s too complex and too expensive and too fragile."

Soylent can be bought in a package but the formula is online and there are a lot of people DIYing their own. The concept of many enthusiasts is that Soylent replaces any eating you do to survive, so that the remaining eating that you do is "recreational." You might subsist on only Soylent for a few days, then go to Nobu with your friends and "eat" -- and really make an occasion of it. Woo-hoo.

This is an application of the approach to life associated with the "lifehacking" movement: as the New Yorker says, this is "devising tricks to streamline the obligations of daily life, thereby freeing yourself up for whatever you’d rather be doing."

This is interesting because -- well, how can I put this nicely? It seems to me fucking insane?

What is "whatever you'd rather be doing" that is so great and so important that you can't be bothered to eat some food? I mean, we're not talking laundry. We're talking eating. It's fun. It's pleasant. It isn't all that time-consuming. What's so great that you have to get back to it in thirty seconds instead of twenty-minutes?

It's a perfect instantiation of the problem of the previous post -- of The Great Fun Crisis of the Twenty First Century. If you structure everything as either a cost or a benefit, you define out of existence the "just sort of nice and fun in a mild healthy sort of way," so it's irresistible to reduce costs and maximize benefits.

It's like a digitization of an analogue life. Sorry: sitting down to a baked potato or some pasta and a salad, talking with a friend or family member, what are you doing? It's neither the 0 of costs minimized or the 1 of pleasure maximized. So it comes out as irrational.

The New Yorker author, Lizzie Widdicome, after a few days drinking Soylent, finds on waking she's at a loss: she doesn't want to settle down to work yet, so what to do? She goes out for coffee. She sees someone order a bagel at her neighborhood place. She's envious: "Mmm, bagel with butter." But of course, she's not hungry, and she doesn't need the calories -- she's already had her Soylent. She concludes the experience this way:

... I knew that I was better off than the bagel eater: the Soylent was cheaper, and it had provided me with fewer empty calories and much better nutrition. Buttered bagels aren’t even that great; I shouldn’t be eating them. But Soylent makes you realize how many daily indulgences we allow ourselves in the name of sustenance.

I get what she's saying. But what are we, training for the apocalypse? Every moment, maximizing efficiency? It's like, bagels: not a perfect food! BUT: also not a good enough indulgence! Like if you're going to get your pleasure, you have to max it out.

The whole thing makes you wonder what the point is, in the whole meaning-of-life way, like what are we doing all of this for?  Honestly, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that for most people, the bagel with butter, and similar foods, especially if you eat them with other people, really are the meaning of life.

Enthusiasts of lifehacking clearly feel another call: they have things they need to get back to, STAT.

So: If lifehacking is about getting back to "things we'd rather be doing?" what are those things exactly? Sex? Dancing? Making music? Painting pictures? Taking care of children? Taking care of sick people?



Honestly those are answers I'd sort of understand. But they're almost never the ones that seem to come up. What comes up a lot is work.

I get that some people have to work all the time to make ends meet. And that is a serious social problem. The solution to this problem is not Soylent -- what, so rich people can eat food and poor people can suck it? No, the solution to this problem involves spreading the wealth around, more sensible social organization, investment in infrastructure. As is frequently mentioned, the world is making more food than ever. The problem is in moving it around appropriately.

And that, friends, is not a problem with a "start up" solution.

I get the impression, though, that a lot of people drinking Soylent just want to get back to studying, or coding, or playing video games. Why? Are those things really so great? Or is the problem competition -- that in a competitive society you have to do all the ridiculous time-saving things other people do if you're going to keep up?

Toward the end of the article the main creator of Soylent says admiringly, "Bucky [Buckminster Fuller] has a very important idea of ephemeralization, which is something almost as a ghost -- as pure energy or information."

Like the whole post-human thing, I am always mystified by this. What is it you're so eager to do that doesn't involve bodies, senses, being in the world, laughter, or romance? Is Minecraft really that fun?

The Great Fun Crisis Of The Twenty First Century

Mary Cassatt, Woman Reading in a Garden, via Wikimedia Commons

This post is about the great fun crisis of the twenty-first century. You may be asking yourself, how is it possible that a culture that features binge-watching, cupcakes, professional wrestling and craft beer could possibly be a culture suffering from a crisis of fun? Well, I'll tell you.

The great twenty-first century fun crisis isn't quantitative. It's not a like a fun shortage, where you have to line up for fun in the style of the old 1970s gas lines. It's more like a crisis about the nature of fun. Fun and its friends are caught up in a special dilemma of our time, one rooted in creepy theories about preferences and the point of doing things.

One one horn of the dilemma is GOALS. I'm so sick of hearing about goals. You're not allowed to do anything any more without goals. I went to look into taking dance classes a while ago and there was a form for new students and it asked "What made you want to take our classes?" And there were answers for getting in shape, learning to dance for a wedding, hoping to make friends, yada yada yada. You know what was missing? Fun. I had to write it in.

God forbid you get interested in some physical activity without some goal in mind. Fitness people like trainers don't even want to talk to you unless you have goals. About a year ago I was mindlessly musing about how it might be cool to learn to swim in open water -- you know, for fun. I googled around for how to learn, and quickly found that nobody seems to swims in open water for fun. If you're swimming in open water, you're probably training for a triathlon or something. Not that triathlons can't be fun. But you know what I mean. If you're open water swimming to to train for a triathlon, you're not doing it just for fun. You have a goal.

Goals are fine as far as they go. But what we have is goal imperialism. The prevalence of goal oriented amusement means you can't even explain to people why you might be reading a book or going for a walk without some backstory about how your activity fits in to some life plan like "reading the classics in hardcover" or "trying to lose weight." It's ridiculous.

UNLESS, that is, you're willing to commit to something completely pointless.

The other horn of the modern fun dilemma is hedonistic pointlessness. The one loophole in the Rule Of Goals is that you get to do things that you do purely for pleasure, with no point whatsoever, just because the activity is hedonically perfect -- but only if the activity is hedonically perfect.

The Get-Of-Of-Goals-Free card can be played for anything you're willing to do as a pure pleasure. Binge-watch Game of Thrones, eat a pan of brownies, and no one asks you what your goals are. They get it: Girls Just Want To Have Fun.

But increasingly the loophole only works for things that are super double extra secret pleasurable. Why would you do something sort of mildly pleasant, engaging, constructive and healthy when you could be doing something ridiculous and Xtreme?

If you don't have the goal backstory for the pleasures of the reading or the walk, you get that quizzical look where people are like "Oh, so that's your very favorite thing that you like to do? That's cute, I guess." As if choosing to do these mild activities -- just for fun -- makes you some kind of culture snob or Puritan.

The more I thought about this, the more I noticed how its embedded in our whole way of talking and thinking about what we do and why. We use the language of preferences, costs, and trade-offs. What do you want to do? What are you willing to pay? What are you willing to do to get there? Work hard play hard! There's no room in there for just nice activities that are sort of pleasant and good things to do.

I don't know how the causal arrows go, but it's striking that our contemporary formal theory of what it makes sense to do -- rational choice theory -- takes as axiomatic that there are things you want, and there are costs to getting them, and the whole question is how much you're willing to "pay" to get your preference satisfied. So the problem is officially built in.

There's something about separating your life's activities into these categories that encourages the crisis of fun. If you're paying a cost to get something, you want to pay as little as possible. If you're getting a preference satisfied, you want as much satisfaction as possible.

So, for instance, if you're thinking about learning how to open water swim, or taking a dance class, you have to ask yourself either What Is My Ultimate Goal Here -- and am I pursuing it in the most efficient way possible? OR you have to ask yourself Is This The Most Hedonically Perfect Way To Spend My Acquired Preference Capital?

It's an odd fit for many of life's activities, and it's a terrible crisis for fun. I'm thinking this is why, in the end, I have a problem with a pleasant day.

Is It Disenchanted In Here, Or Is It Just Me?

Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie confer at the start of The Hunger

The older I get, the less I find to be all "Ooh-Aah" about. I mean, as time goes on, I find fewer and fewer occasions to feel like there are "Cool Kids" I haven't gotten to know, or awesome alternative lifestyles I could have had if only I'd focused on conceptual art/guitar playing/modern dance in my youth, or amazing experiences that are just beyond my reach.

When I was younger it wasn't like this. When I was in high school I got obsessed with the movie The Hunger and I dreamed of being taken home by David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve to some impossibly beautiful and elegant home. And then when I was in college I read a book about Edie Sedgwick and Andy Warhol's studio, "The Factory," where hopelessly, stratospherically cool people gathered to be the it person of the moment and I thought with despair how I would never be interesting in the right sort of way for that sort of thing.

But now? Not so much. I see huge elegant homes and I think about the upkeep and the family infighting that money causes and how it doesn't matter if you're David Bowie -- your day is still basically made up of doing some things and eating and talking to the people you love and that's it.

I think about The Factory and I remember how even if taking a lot of drugs might be fun for a bit after a while it's just boring and you can either stop and feel awful or continue and become completely a mess and -- let's face it, I wouldn't last five minutes involved in a 45 minute movie that's just someone eating (From Wikipedia: "Finally, notice is taken of a brief appearance made by a cat").

On the one hand, Great! Right? No more being a kid with her nose pressed against the glass. It's true: it's awesome, because basically it means the things I really do want are the things I have. Yay!

On the other hand, it makes the world a little disenchanted. There's nothing like seeing things realistically to take a little of the magic out of it all.

I had always thought of this kind of disenchantment was basically about getting older. It's a classic middle aged trope, right?

But then last week I was on the internet and I started to get the creepy feeling that it's not just me getting older -- it's a world of disenchantment out there.


It started when I read that Exene Cervenka -- lead singer of amazing punk band X! -- had called the  Santa Barbara shootings a "hoax" and I was like "WTF?" And then I was reading the comments on that and someone made reference to Moe Tucker being a Tea Partier. And then I was remembering how Tucker was the drummer for the Velvet Underground, but also sang the sweet but haunting Lou Reed song "I'm Sticking With You" (released on the Velvet Underground VU compilation album).

So then I looked it up, and it was true -- about her becoming part of the tea party, and other distressing things. And then I was thinking about all the associations I'd had with Tucker's voice in that song and how they would never be quite the same now that I had this particular detail in my mind.

Then I thought about how the whole enchantment things is really so twentieth-century. We all know so much stupid crap about everyone else, now. Everyone's stupidities are out there on display, and the downsides of everything are obvious.

It used to be mildly possible to imagine your favorite cool person would actually be cool in person, but now it's like forget it. Now even when things are presented as glamorous, it's some fake-out version of glamor created for social media.

I know there's a school of thought out there in which disenchantment is characteristic of the last few centuries in deep and pervasive ways, rooted in basic structures of the modern era like markets and science and bureaucracies.

But I think my examples suggest there's something specially disenchanted about right now. Clearly the possibility of mass production was no threat to the possibility of being enchanted by Andy Warhol -- on the contrary.

What we have now though, brought on by various forces, is a keen sense of the drudgery aspects of all kinds of things.

It's a new, millennial disenchantment, just for us.

Denial Of Death: The Metrics

 Creepy picture by Jean Fouquet via Wikimedia Commons

Maybe you have your own pet theory about these things, but here in the mind of the accidental philosopher there's one thing clear about human behavior: a lot of what we do we do to avoid thinking about the fact that we're going to die.

People sometimes act like that's a bad thing. Like, sometimes you encounter people who are all mad about "materialism" or "kids today" and who say things like "all that shopping, it's just people trying desperately to avoid facing their own mortality, it's pathetic" or "all that social networking, it's just people desperately trying to avoid facing their own mortality, it's pathetic."

In my view these people have really got hold of the wrong end of the stick. Because the question isn't whether we do things to avoid thinking about mortality. Of course we do. What the hell is pathetic about that? If you're really thinking clearly about it, how is there any rational response to the fact of mortality other than life-destroying sadness? The only proper response is avoidance and repression.

So the question isn't whether that's what we're doing. The question is how suited our behaviors are to the task at hand. That's what we really need to know.

Since we're here in 2014, let's put it this way: what we need are metrics.

I propose two.

First, of course, you want to know how effective the relevant behavior is: just how distracted are you from death while you're doing the thing? This will vary from person to person, of course, but there may be some generalities.

Second, you want to know how harmless the relevant behavior is: is your death denial someone else's second-hand smoke? If it is, you got a problem.

Despite some obvious problems, shopping measures up better than you think. For people who like to shop, shopping is extremely effective at all kinds of mood improvement. I hate it when people act like the problem with spending money on clothes, shoes, and gear is that it doesn't make you feel better. Duh, of course it makes you feel better. There might be other reasons not to do it, but only the Harmony Myth of Human Nature would trick you into thinking that just because something is problematic it can't also be really great.

On the harmlessness metric, I'm giving shopping a C+ -- not great, but needs improvement. Finer points of the analysis would get into the effects of capitalism on economic growth, the effects of spending rather than giving, and the effect of piles of useless crap on the environment. Before you get ready to fail shopping on the harmlessness metric, consider how it stacks up against violent masculinist sports -- another classic death denial activity.

IMO, the metric analysis of denial of death puts a number of the classic denial activities in a more positive light.

1. Pointless social networking.


Say what you want about pointless social networking. As a distraction from death -- well, it's pretty goddamn distracting. As people are always saying, it distracts us from everything. So high score there. And if you do it right, it's pretty harmless.

Main downsides: uses electricity, entails risks of making yourself annoying or offensive to larger groups of people.

2. Sex.

Sex is the classic denial of death activity, one of the main things that, when you're in the middle of it, is so absorbing it casts out everything else. Highly effective.

In terms of harmlessness, sex gets a bad rap. IMHO the problem isn't sex, but sexism and other stupidities: in the ridiculous world of men "scoring" and women "giving it away," -- yeah, of course, problems. Don't forget -- as we've said before on this blog, if you want sex, work for feminism.

3. General time wasting.

People like to waste time, and there's always a lot of hand-wringing about it, like oh noes, some people are wasting time when they could be Achieving Something. But when you look at the destructive aspects of some kinds of death denial, the peace and quiet of general time wasting starts looking pretty good.

I often think of the Pascal quote: "All of humanity's problems stem from [our] inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

Next time you're thinking of engaging in a little death denial, don't be too hard on yourself. If you not screwing up the world and being horrible to other people, you're probably ahead of the curve. 

Why Does Life Suck? A Tripartite Theory, With Reflection On The Entrepreneurial Self Of Modern Times

Contemplative cat is contemplative

A couple of years ago I was browsing my blog stats, and I saw that someone had landed here after googling "Why does life suck"?

This gave me pause. Because I would very much like the suckiness of life to be one of the things people feel they can learn about on my blog. Along with death, it's pretty much the main topic of human existence.

As I see it, the suckiness of life has a tri-partite existence.

First, there's Inherent Suckiness, the suckiness of the human condition. Human life is brief, frequently unsatisfying, and often boring. Though people tend to stop talking about this as they get older, the world's two-year-olds all agree with me: the whole thing is way dumber than it has to be.

There's not much we can do about inherent suckiness.

Second, there's Natural Suckiness, the suckiness induced by nature. Nature must have a really great PR team, because even though its full of disease, death, and deprivation, everyone talks about it like it's goddamn mother's milk.

Natural suckiness can often be alleviated through human effort and invention, and generally speaking I think it's reasonable to say we're working on it. We don't have a cure for cancer, but if our creators came down and accused us of sleeping late and dicking around, I think we'd be justified in telling them to STFU and get off our case already. We're working on it. OK?

But the last category of Self-Inflicted Suckiness is the most important and interesting. This is where we humans are making things worse for ourselves, making the world a hostile place, making a society that makes us crazy.

If you live in the 21st century I'm sure you can think of a zillion ways we humans are making things worse than they should be. This blog has touched on some of them over the years. It's a winner take all society. If you're at the bottom you're screwed. It's not enough to do something well, you have to promote promote promote. 

A few months ago I read this book, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, about how neoliberalism survived the financial crisis. It's got a lot of great interesting stuff, but one thing that really grabbed me was the idea of the new "entrepreneurial self" that's required for life in modern times.

The idea is that, especially in the contemporary US, everyone is expected to be their own generator of prosperity. This means that to survive each person must be not only sophisticated and knowledgable and self-promoting, but also completely unresistant to change and willing to accept blame for every setback.

That is to say, if you fail, you fucked up. It's your fault, and you better do something about it. Get yourself to a motivational seminar. Get a life coach. Look up one of the many websites using the term "entrepreneurial self" in the positive way.

When I encountered these ideas I found connections among things I hadn't seen before. The relentless positivity requirements of our modern era, the omnipresent narrative in which in which YOU deal with life's problems by curing YOUR inner demons thus ramping up YOUR personal best, the constant need to package each setback in life as a triumph over obstacles ... all of these are connected by the same metaphor for humanity, a metaphor that flatly denies the obvious: that we are all interdependent on one another.

So if you're thinking about why life sucks, and you want to move beyond the obvious Inherent Suckiness and Natural Suckiness of life and into the Self-Induced Suckiness, the entrepreneurial self might be a good starting point -- though I'm sure you can generate many rich examples of your own.