Reciprocity

Way back in 1992, I hooked up saxophonist Ralph Lalama for a week long gig in Spain, where we both performed at the Seville Expo with a Catalan big band. We got along well, and a couple of weeks after we returned to New York, I bumped into him at a jam session he was running in the East Village. "Hey, Ralph!" I chirped. He glanced at me cooly, nodding imperceptibly before turning away.

One of Ralph's buddies explained things to me. "Ralph, you see, fancies himself an elder statesman in the jazz scene, so he figures that who he greets and how he greets them confers a certain anointment and validation. He wasn't sure you'd earned a full level of public respect from him."

"But," I replied, "I wasn't looking to be anointed. I was just saying hi." Ralph's friend shrugged helplessly. This is how it parses to Ralph. It had nothing to do with what I was looking for. I was hardly in this movie. This is the Ralph movie.

A week later, I bumped into Ralph in a Chinese restaurant. "Hey, Jim!" he chirped. I glanced at him cooly, nodding imperceptibly before turning away. I didn't run into him again for thirty years, whereupon he was still furious about the slight. He wouldn't look at me or talk to me, the ogre who'd dissed him. I never expected him to make the connection of his behavior in his sphere of influence to my behavior in mine, but I certainly never expected any of this to rock his world.

After a long period of unilateralism, I've started leaning into this behavior. I remain non-reactive, and always try to help where I can. I don't act spitefully or hold vendettas, and don't sneer or raise my voice. But I’ve begun to follow the playbook I'm handed. As with Ralph, I mirror. Not with venom or malice. Certainly no extra "oomph" to prove the point. I let people set the rules of engagement, and I amiably follow along. I reciprocate.


Since COVID quarantine, people feel less obligated to reply to one other. They don't answer messages if they're busy, or distracted, or didn't fully understand or approve of what was said. They'll let it go if they don't detect an immediate deliverable. And sometimes they don't reply just because.

I was eager to try this out for myself. It seemed like it might be liberating! So I did an experiment with a couple of longtime friends who'd grown less and less engaging, and declined to reply to each of them just once.

I never heard from either of them ever again.


I stoically followed the Golden Rule for my long unilateral period. But I eventually realized that it doesn't work if there's only one person doing it. As I wrote in The “Golden Rule” is Loftily Unattainable (I'd suggest reading the whole thing; it's short):

When the Bible suggested doing to others as you would have them do to you, it turns out this wasn't a helpful reminder. I always figured it was like "Sit up straight" or "Eat more vegetables"—a sappy homily people sometimes need reinforced, despite its blatant obviousness.

No. I see now that it was flabbergasting existential judo—a Copernican flip of perspective. And it was received as a lofty principle which, like other forms of godliness, could only be aspired to, and never put into actual practice.

Play Your Own Game

A few years ago I shared some strategies I used against the inevitable psychopaths and scammers who floated in among Chowhound's million users (particularly one troublingly metallic individual named, among other things, "Julie").

They are strongly counterintuitive, which was the whole point. If you do the expected thing in battle, response will be quick and escalatory. Playing the other person's game likely leads to stalemate or loss unless you have the time, persistence, and resources to match their investment. But if you play your game, aloofly declining to be baited into the blunt oppositionalism favored by the persistent and/or psychotic, you can win your game without their even noticing.

In fact, if you do it right, it's win-win. They can win the contest they've imagined themselves in against you while never noticing that you're winning the contest you're playing against them. Because they don't even understand what that is. Because it's counterintuitive, and not just rotely, bluntly oppositional.

Here's the thing about people settled into a game-playing mental frame: they will assume, unquestioningly, that the other side is playing the same game. Like military leaders throughout history, we discovered the secret: it's a huge advantage to flip the script and find a way to play a different and higher-level game, unbeknownst to your adversary. This relocates the adversary to a sealed box, under a bright light, where they can unknowingly be examined, manipulated, and disarmed. They carry on their fight, and may even feel they're winning, but you can't lose because the conflict's been transparently reframed on your terms.

Of course it's never quite that antiseptic and seamless. Periodically, Julie would become faintly cognizant that our game did not match hers. At such moments, we were forced to switch tactics and shift protocols, leaving us momentarily vulnerable to further escalation. But she never quite got the best of us.

Julie assumed the game was a simple cat-and-mouse. She'd try to post, and we'd try to detect and delete. If we tipped our hand by rapidly and thoroughly deleting her, that would provide her with juicy, useful feedback regarding our capabilities, and she'd develop countermeasures. Escalation! Julie's prickly antennae were perpetually tuned to this dance. Again, she was no mastermind (for example, she could never quite fully organize her myriad personas), but, like any sentient organism, she could absorb feedback and use it to learn and to grow.

We recognized early on that we were under no compulsion to play the same game. Honestly, we didn't care much if Julie posted, so long as she wasn't damaging the site. Her attempts to ingratiate with the community - to blend in, apparently defeating our defense systems by posting like a normal harmless Chowhound user - actually didn't bother us at all. So we left those up.

Most of them, anyway. We'd randomly delete a few, after waiting a random amount of time, just to confuse her feedback curve with noisy data. Consistency on our end would teach her things.

Two followup thoughts:

1. Persistent and psychotic people are Strong Drunks.

I picked up a book about "urban survival", which turned out to be pretty silly, though highly amusing. But it did contain one insight which I've retained. In the chapter about surviving bar fights, it explained that drunk people are sluggish and clumsy, so it's easy to outrun or outmaneuver them. But if they ever get their hands firmly on you, watch out, because drunks are stronger than sober people.

I've never been in a bar fight, but the image of the strong drunk has become a touchstone for me. Time and again I've found myself confronting people (or institutions) functioning as Strong Drunks, and who therefore needed to be finessed or adroitly outmaneuvered. The mantra is: don't ever let them get you in their clutches!

Cops, for example, are strong drunks. If a policeman decides, rightly or wrongly, that you're on the wrong team, and has you within his grasp, you will be out of options. There's ample maneuvering room in defusing that determination, but if it goes the wrong way, and you're within their range, you'll find yourself utterly powerless.

Cockroaches are the opposite. A roach can't hold or harm you...but they hide well and they run fast. If you manage to catch one, it can be effortlessly stamped out, but there are always more of them craftily evading you, and you can't do much about it. To a cockroach, you are the strong drunk.

Even if you deem yourself smarter, stronger, and in a superior position, you must avoid getting caught in a clench with a Strong Drunk. Rather, the move is to skamper wildly between their legs, like a cockroach. You need to smell the scent of a Strong Drunk and avoid clenches at all cost, because that only plays to their strength.

2. This is a broad strategy for life—at least those parts of life where you're forced into some sort of competition.

Note: if you are competitive by nature, every word of this will strike you as nonsense, because you are viscerally compelled toward blunt oppositionalism. Toward clenches. Best regards, you strong drunk you, from me here in my cockroach hidey hole.

It particularly explains my investment philosophy. I never try to outsmart other investors. I know my limits, and I recognize that there are many people who will beat me in a clench every time. There are smarter, more powerful people (institutional, professional investors) and there are more rabidly persistent ones (day traders). I can't beat either at their own games, so I don't try.

As I've written many times, I've paid my bills by buying Apple whenever its stock dips (circa 25% every couple of years) and then riding it above its previous high. This strategy isn't secret or brainy, yet almost no one seems interested in it. Why? Because they're playing different games.

Day traders are occupied with hourly and daily results, while my approach requires thinking in months and years (with the added benefit of low taxes on the long term gains). Meanwhile, professional and institutional investors pursue massive jackpots with no interest in the comparatively modest gains that attract my attention. To them, I'm like a dog nibbling discards beneath the dining table.

If I tried to compete with either group, I'd be ground into hamburger meat. Instead, I play my game, on my terms. And the curious thing is that everyone would readily concede that my way works. It's just not of interest to them. So I operate in my own little ecosystem, quietly picking ripe fruit from low branches, with no predators to contend with.

I think I've always done things this way.

Belabored Serendipity

I've made critical improvements to my recent posting on Serendipity.

I can't understand how I could have published it when it was still so blurry, but blurriness doesn't look blurry until you've thought of a sharper way. By the same token, the photos I took with my iPhone 5 look comically bad, though they seemed awesome at the time.

It's not actually so difficult to come up with fresh and credible observations, connections, and explanations. I've been explaining this as one of my themes, outlining how we fritter away attention and creativity on self-defeating whims (see postings tagged "Creativity", but start low, not with the more recent). It's also not hard for me to write clearly and entertainingly, after 35 years of professional experience. But it's really hard to introduce a fresh thought and make it land for readers. For starters, you need to judge whether it will actually land or not, which is like stepping into a cognitive house of mirrors.

I've been using chatGPT to poke me when I'm foggy or tedious. It doesn't fix stuff, it just points to problems, keeping me on my toes. But a chatbot learns faster than a human, so at this point it can see through my fog—and to my essential point—too easily. It's like the smart minder of a babbling idiot, discerning bright gist even from drooly mumblings.

This process never gets easier. Which is weird, because I'm mostly improving. My insight has sharpened and grown more fertile, and my writing skills continue to hone. But the two must struggle to keep pace with each other, which feels pretty vicious circle-ish. Plus, my cosmic background fogginess increases with age, layering in another unknowable fog factor, as I grow too foggy to notice my fog. My kingdom for a reliable fog detector!

But, hey, the venture feels like a fitting Zen art, so here I am. I proudly declare my foggy essay on serendipity newly razor sharp. To me, anyway. You? You might find it totally foggy. And next week it may seem a turd to me as well. And so it goes.

Scorn and Grace

I feel that it is a matter of basic respect and courtesy to graciously allow others to dislike or even hate me for no good reason. If we can’t allow each other our whimsical preferences, then what does it even mean to be human?

This represents just part of a broad spectrum of bad behavior I feel compelled to accept. I watched my mother make awful decision after awful decision as she aged, while her confidence - and her derision toward my smart, compassionate input - only climbed. It occurred to me, like a bell ringing, that she's allowed. We all are. This is a matter of basic human respect. We viscerally feel that love compels drastic intervention when, in fact, it compels something much more challenging: restrained tolerance.

Every one of us is entitled to be wrong, counterproductive, toxic, self-destructive, demented, blinkered, and all the rest. We’re free to stroll obliviously off of cliffs, even as our friends scream in alarm. This isn’t edge-case stuff for losers or elders. It's a basic proposition of human sociality.

If I can insert a word of wise council, I'll certainly do so, never insisting on compliance. But I never interject in my own self defense. It would be disrespectful overstep and, worse, it's low-priority. With nearby cliffs to holler about, we must choose our battles!

A former friend of mine became an airline pilot despite having the emotional control of a disturbed toddler. I did say a gentle word to him a few years ago, and there is a non-zero chance, as he continues to endlessly curdle and fester on that atrocity, that he may one day hunt me down and strangle me. I don’t regret my gentle word—someone needed to say something before he endangered multitudes. But I won't "fix" his hatred, nor should I. It is a matter of basic human respect and courtesy to graciously allow others to dislike or even hate me for no good reason.


A few weeks ago, I wrote this related thought:

If someone has a wrong idea about you—about something you said, did, or thought—you might, with effort, convince them otherwise. Maybe!

But here's the problem: we exalt our assumptions and opinions, even when they're whimsical. They outweigh even provable truth. So 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 offend, confuse, or simply trigger another wrong conclusion, you’ll be treated as a repeat offender. No more benefit of the doubt for you, mister.


I no longer correct people. Whatever wrong thing they're thinking about me, they can hold on to it. I don't exhaust myself playing whack a mole.

John Adams on Reframing

John Adams, writing very early in the Revolutionary War, well before the Declaration of Independence:

"That we are divorced is to me, very clear. The only question is, concerning the proper Time for making an explicit Declaration in Words. Some people must have time to look around them, before, behind, on the right hand, and on the left, then to think, and after all this to resolve. Others see, at one intuitive glance into the past and the future, and judge with precision at once."

Reframing is instantaneous. But we can be sluggish in our consideration, and in our trigger-pulling. We tend to overcommit to the present frame, even when it's untenable. It's the same phenomenon as a "frozen perspective".

This is also what Buddhists mean by "attachment" (upādāna). It's about attachment to a given framing, not greedy attachment to possessions. This attachment is deeper and more foundational, leaving us feeling stuck and unable to shift perspective. Hence suffering.

Adams recognized that people get stuck, but couldn't quite place the "how" and "why". And even the Buddha struggled to express this subtle notion in understandable language. "Attachment" has been eternally misconstrued. Consider all the Buddhists through the centuries who stripped off their clothes and wandered naked into the forest, ferociously (and ironically) stuck in a framing of Seeking. Stiffening their backbones with resolve to transcend precisely the sort of attachment they were stoking.

The Troubling Gauntlet of Self Forgiveness

If you're still a jerk by your 60s, it's not because you're oblivious.

By then, you've had ample worldly feedback. But you ultimately decided "I gotta be me."



The usual thinking is this: "Those who wish to reap the rewards of being around me need to prove themselves by putting up with me. And I’m worth it."

It hardly seems worth mentioning that such a person never is worth it. Because they're the sort of person who'd gladly collapse into being a jerk. And there's a word for that: "Jerk".

A 20 or 30 year old jerk might grow out of it. They may be momentarily distracted or confused. Forgive them, for they know not what they do. But by age 60, you've had a red line drawn for you beneath your awfulness very many times. You can try to disregard it, or shrug it off, but you are well aware. You've merely practiced self-forgiveness. So you're cool with it.

By that age, we've spent enough time in the kiln of worldly feedback that we ought to be just about perfect. If you'll think about it, it's strange that people can maintain their jerkiness for the better part of a century. It's not because they're busy, or oblivious, or their faculties have begun to fail, or terrible things have happened to them. No, none of that.

It's that they've made peace with it. They're fine with it.


Corollary: I've previously observed that old people don't repeat stories and jokes due to failing memory. They do it because of failing to give a fuck about forcing us to sit through the same stories and jokes. They have self-forgiven.

Insomnia Dreams

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".


I have a theory about chronic insomnia - the kind that lasts for weeks or months. It's rarely actual insomnia. Instead, it's a dream of insomnia. We are not insomniac in bed. We're insomniac in a dream. While sleeping.

There's a way to check. If you're a chronic insomniac, next time you feel unable to sleep (after having laid still for a good while, and without a racing mind occupied with daily life issues), try to find your arms. As often as not, you will need to forcibly remind yourself where they are. You will need to reconstitute them.

The observation may not seem to offer much pragmatic help, but try this reframing which works for all sorts of insomnia:

Grant permission for some trusted, benevolent entity to whisk you and your bed elsewhere. You don't need to know where, or observe the journey. Swaddled comfortably in blankets, surrender control of the process and let it happen while you sleep. "Take me wherever," like the mindset of a trusting toy poodle stuffed into its owner's satchel.


This may explain why many people insist they get zero sleep but don't suffer from the expected health effects. They might be irritable or drowsy (from the anxiety of it), but do not present as never-sleepers

Other postings on Insomnia

Proportionality

There are perfectly normal, reasonable people who, when they get angry, will give you a stern talking to.

There are perfectly normal, reasonable people who, when they get angry, will punch you in the face.

And there are perfectly normal, reasonable people who, when they get angry, will blow up your house.

Proportionality is one of the least considered traits in the human realm. It's assumed to be part of the standard human basket of rational normality. Nice people don't blow up houses. Or so you'd think.

Nice people might be sloppy, or bad at sports, or tone-deaf, or cowardly, or color blind, or lazy, or have a nasty temper or poor taste. Nice people can be flawed in any number of ways, but proportionality doesn't seem like any separate thing. It seems like it should be baked into basic "niceness and normalcy," though it absolutely is not.

My father gave me this useful advice: "Somebody who kills a bunch of people? You can be friends with him. But somebody who suddenly kills his wife after 35 years of happy marriage; that guy you need to watch out for." Years later, I brewed up this corollary: "There's no reason to be scared of a hitman. A hitman is as unlikely to randomly kill you as an accountant is to randomly do your taxes."

For me, proportionality is even more insidious (though of course there's overlap in the Venn diagram). You might be able to get along with a murderer, but someone who lacks proportionality must never ever be your friend.

How can you know? The usual move is to evaluate a person as a whole, and, if they seem normal, reasonable and nice, feel assured that "they would never [etc]". But proportionality is not instantly observable, nor does it always accompany an appearance of normalcy.

Do you have any normal and reasonable friends who are oddly hawkish in their foreign policy opinions? That's not a political quirk. That's disproportionality. A girlfriend once told me how she'd sent an unspeakable package to someone who'd wronged her. I stuck with her, because, hey, it was just a story, and she seemed so normal and reasonable. She "would never" do the sort of thing she'd openly confessed to doing! She seemed proportional, though, Jesus Lord, she certainly was not.

Proportionality is something to watch for, and not let oneself be swayed by other aspects. People can lack it, while seeming perfectly nice...and rational...and normal.


Spitefulness is another under-feared quality. It's hard to define, but usually involves disproportionality. When spiteful people get a little mad, they might take a big bite out of someone. And remain faithful in their malice for some time. Yeesh.

Sorry, Manny

I'd like to apologize to my late cousin Manny.

Manny would always drive to a destination the day before an appointment, just to orient himself. Even if it was an hour or two away—in fact, especially if it was an hour or two away. I thought he was neurotic. No, he was right.

I've had innumerable restaurants on my check-out lists for years which, upon serendipitously passing en route to some other destination, suddenly became "available" to me in a way I can't account for. Intellectually knowing where they were was completely different from experiencing where they were. "Knowing" is a map, while experiencing is ownership. At that point, it was never more than a week or two before I'd go and try it.


An unboxed rice cooker has sat on my kitchen counter for a solid month. I'd love to tell a colorfully self-deprecatory story about how it terrified me; about how I was doing a Jed Clampett, confused by the microwave in his fancy new kitchen. But, no. I just lacked the inertia. I've actually craved rice over the intervening weeks, but my craving couldn't quite overcome the inertia.

Yesterday I tore the thing out of its box, tried to make sense of the instructions, examined the hackish packing materials (questioning, for the nth time, whether manufacturers flow returned items back into stock pool). I felt micro-disappointment at the flimsiness of the rice paddle, the imperfect size of the unit, and its disappointingly short power cord. And an ambiguity in the set-up instructions forced me to look to YouTube for clarification. Were any of these snags truly upsetting? God, no. I have bigger problems than short power cords. But, still, it was kinda short, and the snag was clocked.

So finally I actually own a rice cooker, and will happily cook rice upon momentary whim.

Serendipity

According to Murphy's law, with sufficient iterations things will screw up every possible way—and also some ways that seemed impossible. But Murphy also says that a zillion typing monkeys will produce Hamlet, however serendipitously. The key is spotting the serendipity.

This is not a small point.

Serendipity is rarely an obviously splendid result. Serendipity is conjured in the noticing, and the valuing, and the follow-up. You need wide-open receptivity to great results that aren't exactly what was expected. It's what pessimists call “optimism” and sane people call clarity. Serendipity is in the interpretation. The framing!

Even errors can inspire. A person who's made herself a sensitive receiver can tune serendipity from failure. This is the machinery behind the old platitude about making lemonade from lemons. It's not about blind persistence; it's about paying attention. The more attuned you are to serendipity, the more detection blurs into creation. You start getting lucky a lot.

So here's the pragmatic upshot: when catastrophe strikes, I take a beat, then flip myself into future past tense:

"Little did I know at the time that this seeming catastrophe created the conditions for something great to happen!"

I proceed straight toward that with nary a sigh. Who's got time to waste on drama? It's entirely a matter of serendipity detection/creation. When I remain wide open and deeply attuned (maybe adding eager joy to my mix, despite the recent catastrophe), serendipity starts popping up like mushrooms.

This sounds so blessedly easy! Why isn't it usually so simple? Readers hypnotized by the cartoon-like ease I've described may struggle to place their fingers on the frustrating part. Relax. Let me help you.

Here it is: None of this is available while histrionically lamenting the catastrophe.

We think we have a part to play; a dramatic obligation we've seen portrayed a thousand times in movies. Catastrophe means we grasp our head in pain and groan and furiously sweep all the papers off our desk and drink to excess and shrink into dejected shadows of our former selves. Time out for tantrums!

The lamentation trope is how we make it worse. We dump wet, gloppy cement over the scenario and patiently wait for our feet to be solidly stuck...just because it's what people do.

Calm is the prerequisite, catastrophe is the hinge. And the essential question is this: How fast can you calm the fuck down when the expected yumyum doesn't careen down the chute into your waiting maw? How soon can you pivot to the path that might later make you recall "Strangely enough, it turned out for the best!"? How much time will you waste playing the scene to its ridiculous hilt, perhaps wrecking absolutely everything just to flaunt how wrecked you felt?

Since we take our agony cues from movies, here's a classic movie moment that might de-program some unnecessary angst.



see also "Resilience Means Giving Serendipity a Chance"