Knowing Right from Wrong

My family is a perfect social experiment for this. None of them has ever felt wrong, while I’ve rarely felt confidently right. And our respective outcomes have diverged drastically. 

Not at first, though. I started off more confident and more wrong, dutifully following genetics. But then, goddam it, I stumbled into doing something one must never do: I began to clock my wrongness. And I noticed it everywhere. I was soaking in it.

Self-delusion requires fortitude I lack—so my way forward was obvious: diligently fill gaps, sharpen dull points, strip lazy bias, and extinguish brash know-it-all propensity—that last because someone requiring sustained and rigorous reconditioning could hardly feel cocky.

You can feel smart or you can be smart. One of the other. Smart-feelers are hilariously dumb (in fact, that's the basis for most comedy). Dumb-feelers are often right, but can't enjoy it because, alas, they know better.

So the question is: how badly do you want to be right? Do you want it badly enough to feel wrong? Like, forever? Will you pay that price?


Consider software testing. If you're certain that your app is indisputably perfect, contemptuously rejecting bug reports and complaints, imagine how your app will suck!

Everything starts out crude, but a properly diligent polishing stage—where all the good stuff happens!—is the exclusive domain of people capable of questioning their intrinsic majesty. Learning, growth, and change all require acknowledging that one is not a shining paragon of perfection.

Puny Luxury

Felix Dennis wrote that "The transition from poverty to comfort is a massive leap in human happiness. The transition from comfort to wealth is an exercise in diminishing returns."

This reads quaintly in our era, where even the supposed "poor" live beyond previous notions of comfort and even wealth. But it's not quaint for me. I spent most of my adult life well short of comfort. In fact, I was the poorest person I knew—never earning more than a pittance while doing respected work in seven fields—before selling Chowhound.

Most people assumed I'd made a titanic windfall, but, no, it left me merely comfortable. And the discrepancy between reality and perception was less jarring for me because the jump from poverty to comfort really did feel titanic. To this day, I cackle with glee whenever I throw my car into a commercial parking garage. "Who's Mr. Zillionaire???"

Here's something I've never seen noted: money is only perceived while spending. It's like how you don't feel your clothes until they shift against your skin. If you're not spending, you will not and can not feel the least bit different even if you just won the Lotto. You can, however—and many people do—repeat a hypnotic suggestion to try to reestablish a sense of substantiality (remember "My name is Elmer J. Fudd, I own a mansion and a yacht! My name is Elmer J. Fudd, I own a mansion and a yacht!"?).

The creepy truth that money is only real while spending it explains the cliché of the nouveau riche spendthrift. And as you become locked into that cycle, you must keep raising the ante to maintain the same feeling. Spending alone is insufficient. You must feel acceleration. And feeding a sense of bashing through barriers gets expensive.

My mother blazed a different trail. She'd spent a few decades pinching pennies. Driving all over town to use her coupons and take advantages of sales. Once we had a bit more security, she let up on one single thing: gas. She chose a gas station close to home, and it was her gas station. I think it actually gave her satisfaction to notice other stations costing a couple pennies less per gallon. She got to indulge a preference.

I wasn't in a position to enter the spiral of compulsive spending. An interest in fancy watches, fountain pens, sports cars, or super hi-fi audio might lead me back to scraping. Camrys, not Porsches! And I never lost the dread. A glimpse of dwindling toilet paper supplies might trigger it until I patiently calmed myself down. Elmer Fudd no longer seems so shmucky. Dude was just trying to escape the dread. People raised comfortably don't get it.

If you're prone to cold sweats, but can't afford to fly First Class to endlessly re-stoke a sense of elevation, what do you do? You might simply act normal, changing nothing, but that leads back to coupons and compulsive price chasing. Those who avoid the spending loop often wind up rebounding in this way (so this reckoning explains them, too).

But I found a middle path. I call it "Puny Luxury."

I'm profligate with trifles. I've built up a library of second-hand DVDs and Blu-Rays, most costing under $20. Tons of them, most unavailable on streaming, because my tastes are not mainstream. The library feels like immense wealth. First, just all the quality I'm curating. But also the potential energy of it. Cracking open a snap case means hours of riveting fun...times hundreds. I could spend months watching great movies. Not just the banal chum of Netflix. Exactly the stuff I like, all of it hard to find.

And I allow myself infinite €15 lunches. And I'm free with a few other cheapo pursuits which bring me joy, and where my eye for quality insulates me from feeling ridiculous. The lunches are great. The movies are great. If it's not great, I don't grant the extravagance.

Are parking garages great? Yes, they are. In a far more genuine way than a $1500 fountain pen. If you once spent your life circling around seeking street parking, garages are the height of opulence. You can go anywhere and just leave your car right there. It still boggles my mind. I use them as often as seven or eight times per year.

I'm the billionaire of fifteen bucks. A wee wastrel. And, framed this way, there's an eagerness that never jades. No tolerance accumulates, and I avoid the accelerative loop. I still feel like lofty Mr. Zillionaire whenever I use a parking garage. I do not need an $800 coffee table. The cup sitting upon it (which cost €15) is awesome, as is the coffee itself.

I realize that my mother forged the Puny Luxury path, though she would not have articulated it quite this way...and she hardly branched out beyond gas.


$15 may not be your number. But establishing a realistic number is the key to the ingenious budgeting regime I devised at age seven.

Confessions of a Tap Dancer

This is a world where people stare blankly, waiting, in their boredom, for you to tap dance.

Here's the thing. I'll tap dance on a dime. I'll tap dance if you ask unrudely. In fact, I'll tap dance even when there's no one there at all, on the chance someone might pass by. Not to show off, or to accrue credit, but merely to add my piece to the puzzle—which, in my reckoning, is the entire point of this corroborative art project.

I tap dance just to tap dance. In fact, the only thing that can stop me from tap dancing is people staring blankly, waiting, in their boredom, for me to tap dance.

In that circumstance, I used to tap dance desperately, trying to rouse...something. The dancing would suck, and I'd chalk it up to my own inconsistency. Then I developed some restraint with age. Dead eyes and entitled attitudes not only creeped me out—they'd always creeped me out—but they made me more reluctant to tap dance. I'd occasionally give it a game go, but it never felt right.

Now, at 63, I'm tight as a drum. I'll still tap dance on a dime, or for an empty room, but the dead eyes—what Italians used to call the malocchio (though the term is less common now that this has become the rule, rather than the exception)—shut me down like a toggle switch. It's not emotional. Not some moral resolution. It's that I've stopped flailing against the inevitable. Interestingness cannot persist in the face of boredom. 

I've written a lot about boredom over the years (e.g. "Boredom", "Boredom, Certainty, and Frozen Perspective", and "Why Does Time Pass Quickly or Slowly?"), framing boredom as a dynamic property, rather than the vacant gap we imagine it to be:

Your boredom is God's kryptonite.

Bored outlooks ensure boring experiences

Nothing's more boring than boredom

Bored people spray boredom. It's the ultimate rebuke of Gandhi's exhortation to be the change you wish to see in the world

How do I know boredom works in this counterintuitive way? I'm interesting, and innately zestful, and have found, again and again, that the only thing in the universe that can thwart my irrepressibility is boredom. So I speak from direct experience.

This isn't about me, though. I write this as a minor envoy from Planet Interestingness, where motion, stimulation, and creativity abound. And this isn't my lament. It's my response to yours. As a light snippet of tap dancing, I offer this amiable explanation for your boredom.

Coaxing a Stuck Screw

Forgiving You For My Mistake
I once noted that when someone takes away a false impression of you, and you can make them recognize their misunderstanding, they may correct their false impression, but it will feel to them like forgiveness. They're forgiving you for their misunderstanding. And you'll be on probation going forward:

After all the explaining, you won't have cleared yourself. You'll have been given a reprieve. They'll frame it like forgiveness. They've forgiven your transgression...this time! So the next time you trigger another wrong conclusion, you’ll be treated as a repeat offender. No more benefit of the doubt for you, mister.

Amnesia and You
The amnesiac's friends and family perform all due sympathy, and they intellectually understand the situation. But more viscerally—they'd hardly admit it even to themselves—they take umbrage at having been forgotten.

Just Rehearsing
After 40 years and lots of pricey therapy, she still cannot accept that horrid thing she overheard her mother saying when she was a child.

Finally, she sat down with her mom for a coffee, and summoned the nerve to ask about it. Her mother explained that she was, at the time, rehearsing a script for a community theater production. And all that care and woe and burden dissipated instantly. Like magic!

Which seems like the most natural thing in the world. Why wouldn't it? Conditions changed! If there were any wider lesson to be learned, it would be "always learn the whole story." That seems like the grand takeaway. Profound. Satisfying. Sufficient.

She doesn't even begin to consider the easy release empowered by a minute shift of interpretation. The only change was interpretative, and it was comically minute. None of this is noticed.

Blithely Peeing
Lucid dreamers attest that dreams are 100% real-seeming, and only seem hazy and "dream-like" in recollection. And yet, every morning when we awaken, we sever cherished relationships and lose loved ones forever. How do we react? We blithely pad into the bathroom to pee.

The Banality of Existence
All these vignettes show shifts of perspective grandly torquing our interpretation of the world. And they also carry an odd sense of banality. We could coin the phrase "The Banality of Existence", but it would fall flat, because it's already so innately recognized.

And yet we persist in our fraughtness over this tumultuous world of our interpretation, wherein our suffering is very NON-banal, thank you very much.

Un-Priori

My physical therapist told me I'd need to ice my knee for a few days. I asked if it would need more than one icing per day. "More than once per day? I should hope so!" she chortled. It was ridiculous to imagine any therapeutic effect at all from a mere single application. I was told to ice three times.

I'm sure she was right, and I of course followed her direction, but here she was making an a priori argument in a situation that couldn't support it. If 5 icings were required, or 20 or 150, one might just as easily ridicule the notion of three daily icings.

Years earlier, a friend invited me along to a Wayne Shorter concert. He had an extra ticket. As we filed into our seats for the performance, I asked how much I owed him. "$100" he said. My mouth fell agape. "A hundred dollars? Really?" He looked at me like I was a boob. "It's Wayne Shorter! A legend! Would you really argue that Wayne Shorter isn't worth $100?"

"Why not $13,000?" I replied. Is Wayne Shorter not worth $13,000? Honestly, a mere thirteen grand sounds like a steal to hear one of the all-time greats!

Ice is therapeutic and Wayne Shorter is great. In these cases, they're indisputable assertions. But neither assertion, on its own, supports a particular numerical conclusion.

I hereby coin the term “Un-Priori Argument” for arguments where the conclusion is presumed to ride along on the self-evidence of an undisputed premise. It’s a form of non sequitur (where the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise), in which the conclusion tries to borrow authority from the premise. And now that I've pointed it out, you'll see this everywhere.

Thank You

The rigidly taciturn manager-cashier at the one good Chinese grocery in town, who tersely speaks in minimal Portuguese, and who doesn't know a word of English....

One of the first signs of a newbie traveler is the expectation that Chinese people speak some English, like the oldsters in Chinatown back home.

...rigidly declines to show any indication that he recognizes me, though I know that I am a VIP customer, being the only one asking for holy Thai basil or fermented tofu or obscure Chinese versions of senbei.

It's the sign of a merely accomplished foodie to be surprised that Chinese know about Japanese senbei at all, when they've earned a firm and enduring spot on the Chinese snack pyramid.

But this time, he rang up my stuff, handed me the bag, and there was an almost imperceptible sotto voce "thank-you."

It was so quiet and bashful and slippery that I may have imagined it. And like with the Voice used, hypnotically, by the Bene Gesserit in "Dune," I felt restrained from remarking or reacting in any way. I could only walk out the door, making a loopy, asymmetrical face of utter disorientation.

Has he been working on it? Knowing a thing or two about taciturn Chinese cashiers, I know it is entirely possible he's been practicing for months.

Bad Back Fix

This is part of a series of postings on self-healing, which you can access via the "Self-Healing" tag which appears in the Slog’s left margin below "Popular Entries".


Does your back sometimes "go out"? Here's something incredibly easy and painless to try which can 1. prevent such crises (if you do it a few times a day while feeling ok), and 2. help relieve the crisis.

The things I normally need to do to fix my back when it's out are so agonizing, expensive, and annoying that it's almost outrageous how swiftly and easily this works, considering that it's damned close to doing nothing at all.

Of course, we all have different bodies, different back issues. So no promises. It's for garden variety recurrent back pain — the kind so many suffer from — rather than anything unusual, for example new injuries or unexplained pain. If this is a long-standing problem your healthcare peeps have evaluated, this is for you.

This should not hurt. At all! If you experience even a slight twinge of pain, stop. This isn't for you. The following is not a "no pain no gain" proposition. Also: I'm counting on you to be aware and careful about balance issues while standing on one foot. I'm assuming you're in decently fine form, and reasonably conscientious.

This is a bit wordy, just to be sure I'm clear, but the action itself takes one minute, tops, once you've learned it.

Preparation and Adjustment
Lie down on your back.

Flex your feet, so your toes point toward the ceiling.

Staying nicely relaxed, playfully extend one leg a fraction of an inch. Wait a second or two.

Pull back that leg, and extend the other leg for a second or two.

Slowly, calmly, continue this motion, one leg at a time for ten repetitions.

This next part will take some searching, but it's not hard! Repeat the same shifting action in the hips without moving the foot. You'll need to experiment a bit, but the goal is for the foot to remain still, while the hips slightly tilt, just like before. It's more or less the same action, but with a motionless foot!

Hold for a second or two, then repeat with the other leg.

Continue this motion, one leg at a time. Stay relaxed. No effort, no big "stretching". Just an easy, gentle, playful movement. It should feel very "no big deal".

Come back to it later. You may need to start from scratch, first with moving foot, then re-learning to keep your foot motionless.

Once you are familiar with the movement, you're ready to try it while standing, which is where the therapeutic effect happens.

The Move

---

Stand facing a wall. Reach with your left hand to gently touch the wall with a finger or two. This is just to help maintain balance.

Bend the left knee slightly. Slightly! If you over-bend, you may get lots of knee clicks as you do the exercises, which you want to minimize. Very slight bend (if you get repeated clicks, try bending less).

Lightly raise your right leg from the floor a little.

Check to make sure you're straight, and not leaning to one side. Make sure your chest and neck and head are upright — i.e. properly aligned with the wall in front of you. The fingers on the wall are light, just for balance (if you're frail or have balance problems, find something to hang on to or don't try this).

Perform the hip tilt, slowly and calmly, both ways, for 5 repetitions.

Bend your raised knee to bring that foot in line with your standing foot. Your trunk may lean; correct back to straightness, and perform the hip tilts for 5 repetitions.

Lower the raised leg, straighten the knee.

Repeat on the other side.

---

Feel better? Everyone's different, but for me, this is like magic.

Note: if, at some point, the hip motion becomes a bit foggy for you, return to your back. It's easy to do the motion where your foot pushes forward, and, in the second version, with planted foot, you'll restore focus on the exact hip motion. Stand up at that point and try the exercise for real.

Note that this is not a permanent fix! You'll need to repeat this! But an easy, painless one minute go-to exercise (which you can do literally anywhere; I did it at the grocery yesterday, and no one noticed) beats hours of pain, trips to an expensive chiropractor, pain pills, hot baths, etc.

Advanced Additions
Here's a slightly more advanced addition. It has a stronger effect, and for me (maybe not for you!) it works well even in the midst of a crisis. But note that heavy pain can make your balance more precarious, so be smart and don't take chances!

Perform the above, adding in two more positions for your raised leg:

1. Bend and point the knee of the raised leg forward, with your thigh parallel to the ground (don't change anything else about your body position), and do the usual motion, but a little slower and, if you're in pain, perhaps a few more repetitions.

2. Bend and point the knee of the raised leg down toward the floor, with the foot tucked behind hips and thigh nearly perpendicular to the floor (don't change anything else about your body position). No deep stretches, no extremes. It should feel like no more than a light stretch (and the hip motion is what's important, not the stretch). Proceed with the same advice as above.

So what's the idea here? You're teaching your body that its stubborn desire to make itself assymetrical is not necessary. You're giving your body its bearings.


As with all my self-healing postings, I'd appreciate notes and feedback, whether it works for you or not. Feel free to comment below, or via email

Christianity

You can substitute in that quote, instead of Christ, "negative space", and it still works well. By negative space, I mean all of Everything that's not you.

Everything actually is you, but in order to feel that, you need to integrate what you've needlessly rejected and separated yourself from. And we can conceive of that as Christ.

I think everyone could potentially get behind that. Even atheists.

Steal This Bait!

Back in the golden era of Chowhound, when it was cranking with great tips, and thousands of experts stood ready to generously answer any question, I would occasionally take a moment to feel satisfaction. This monster was the ultimate answer machine, more useful than any food info trove previously imagined.

But those moments were short-lived, because I had friends who knew how good Chowhound was, and how much work it took, and how little juice I had left over, who'd email me to ask "Hey, Jim, I'm going to Prague. Where's good?"

It drove me nuts. I'd spent 10,000 hours, all my savings, and the majority of my hairline building a machine to answer such questions far better than I could. But they figured, being friends of mine, they could do even better by scoring a tip from the man himself. You know: the good stuff!

I might have never been to Prague. And if I had, it was likely years ago. And I certainly don't have comprehensive knowledge of the place. Plus, I'm exhausted! Exhausted from building a divination engine standing ready to answer your question nearly as well as it could possibly be answered, all for free! But it's like none of that ever happened. The machine was hand-waved into irrelevance.

"Fun web site, buddy. Now tell me where to find pizza. I'm a VIP."

I'd go round and round with them, but their response was always the same: "Sure, sure, I get it, Jim, but just give me one tip. One fabulous tip! Like only you can do!"

I'd explain how it didn't really work that way; that one inherently limited dude couldn't possibly compete with the aggregated knowledge of a million insanely devoted chowhounds. But they’d hear only dismissal. Mr. Food Celeb has no time for you.

The truth, of course, was that it felt like too much damned work to consult the divination engine. It had removed the need to buy and read guidebooks, or to shlep around endlessly. But checking a web site was still too much effort. Baby chicks agitatedly await mama bird's sweet, sweet vomit.

Remember the scene in the Jetsons where Jane pushes a button, launching a fleet of vacuuming, dusting, and cleaning robots, and then mops her brow in exhaustion from all the housework? Props to Hanna-Barbera.

---

Nowadays I get messages from acquaintances who've caught a Slog posting or two, or teasers on social media, and imagine I might have some insight re: sanely surviving the whole human-life-on-earth thing. They want to get together and "talk." I know what will follow: "Explain framing!" "Tell me useful stories!" You know, exactly what I've been knocking myself out to do here all this time.

I tell them that I've spent a lifetime pondering and eighteen years struggling to articulate my observations as clearly — and as entertainingly! — as possible. But they imagine that I merely dash this stuff off ("Fun blog, buddy!"), which is insane. No, I write dozens or hundreds of drafts each time until the writing is as clear and sharp as possible.

Just as Chowhound was a passionate kiss for food lovers, this is the very best I can do at making accessible the very best I can do. If you can't parse the effort, it's because I've applied still greater effort to make it effortless. Because that's how proper kisses work.

I've labored to develop whatever I have to offer into a form that's eons better than my raw output as some hapless blabbing dude. And, as with Chowhound, the thing I built must be worth something, or they wouldn't be approaching me!

But approach me they do, unhappy with my demurral.

C'mon, Jim. Just shortcut me to the good stuff.

Again, reading takes effort. But if they dove in, for even an hour or two, they'd likely catch the drift and be on their way to surpassing my own insight. In fact, that's the point! I'm not here to show off what I figured out. Like with Chowhound, my hope is for people to steal the bait, leaving me irrelevant! But the raw, simple sincerity of that proposition seems to make people chase a hidden greater win.

Declining Haughty Gamesmanship in Favor of Butterscotch

In my previous posting, "The Rip-Off", I described how I won — along every conceivable parameter, really — while making the most loser-ish real estate move possible. I claimed that this changed everything. But I just remembered that I learned this move ages ago.

A dysfunctional girlfriend who constantly complained about everyone in her life being out to destroy her accidentally sent me an email intended for her best friend, in which, to my non-surprise, she described me as out to destroy her (when, in fact, I'd spent years working strenuously to fill her with the same vitality and love as I was lavishing on my young web site). Coming after a long series of hair-raising indignities, my patience was exhausted and I severed contact.

Some time later, I mentioned on Chowhound how sad I was that butterscotch had become an endangered flavor, and a package arrived shortly afterwards containing butterscotch candies. I don't remember if there was a note or return address, but it was obvious who'd sent them.

The normal thing to do would have been to snidely throw them in the trash. "Good riddance!" That's the movie scene, right?

But that seemed like a waste of perfectly good butterscotch, so I kept the candy, I ate the candy, and I enjoyed the hell out of the candy noncontextually. It was pretty easy, really. You can choose this outcome, though you’ll never see it in movies. It's a reframing thing.

The moment of realizing my freedom to reject the conventional movie script was similar to another time I recognized that I'm not compelled to play out cinematic clichés at fraught junctures.

I'm free to frame as I'd like. The candy was delicious. My apartment is great. I suppose this sounds selfish, like I always go for high-testosterone wins regardless of circumstance. But nothing like that. If I can win without creating losers, and the movie script says I'd lose by "giving ground", I'll gleefully give all the ground in the world...and take my win. Consideration for others ought to be reserved for generosity, not haughty gamesmanship — and certainly not haughty gamesmanship that leaves me needlessly worse off. Why not just eat the damn candy?