How Posing Tourists Wreck Everything From Scones to Government

A reader unwilling to click the "further reading" link below my previous posting, "The Posing Tourist, Revealed", graciously and politely requested that I flesh out my point more fully. Here you go.


What I’m criticizing here is not people adhering to tradition, convention, discipline, or even rote repetition. A great baker may bake familiar bread. A great singer may sing within a familiar form. A great speaker may use ancient rhetorical tools. None of that is the problem I'm describing.

The problem is framing.

We've all been to bakeries offering perfectly competent pastries assembled from all the standard shortcuts. Their goal is to seem like a bakery; signal as a bakery; do bakery things. Not one bite delights, because it's 100% presentational. "Look at my bakery! I'm the guy running a bakery!" not "Taste my scone into which I've poured my heart and soul."

There are fewer devastating heartfelt scones today than previously, and more role-filling bakeries, not because people are greedy, expedient, or talentless, but because they're scarcely thinking of baking. They just want to run bakeries.

The issue is framing.

Music can affect and inspire when musicians show up to PLAY, rather than act like musicians doing musician things. Sing a legitimately soulful note without trying to hammily seem like The Soulful Singer.

This is not a plea for originality. Artists who frantically reject discipline and tradition to come off as innovators are the worst tourists of all. “Look! Now it’s me breaking the rules!” is still posing in a plywood cutout. Originality is just another image.

Sing, play, paint, or write something because you actually have something to say, and do so with heartfelt talent and care, and it will seem original — or, at least, personal — in a deep way even if you're working firmly within tradition.

This is also not an objection to inhabiting social roles in everyday life. Human beings naturally adopt recognizable styles and identities. That’s fine. The problem begins when this mentality invades matters of substance: leadership, thought, communication, art. The role-playing has leaked into those areas until there's blessed little reality left. We have leaders who speak entirely in the prefab language of leadership; weak, unserious men snarling about strength and seriousness.

People doing substantial or creative work should aspire to more than merely occupying an image of a person who does the thing. But people lacking any such aspiration have flooded into the spotlight purely to seem like thing-doers. The result is a world drowning in their canned fodder.

Yet reality still leaks through. Sometimes the bakery is awesome. Sometimes the singer truly moves you. Sometimes someone says something in a way that cuts through all the prefab cadence and reaches you directly. If this became a broader norm (even just an enduring 5% slice of the pie), we'd live in a fabulous world.

People do know the difference. Yet society is headed the other way.


My previous posting explained how this happens. How it goes off the rails.

I don't see anyone else out there who's spotted what's happening, and why. And it's hard to explain because 1. it's subtle, and 2. a world of poseurs is ill-equipped to discuss reality. It's like explaining the atmosphere to a fish.

The Posing Tourist, Revealed

Virtually every so-called creative artist in the world at this juncture does the equivalent of thrusting their eager grinning face into a cut-out hole in a plywood tourist tableau and saying "Look! It's me! I'm doing the thing!"

Whenever you hear the nth singer sing that bluesy note singers always sing to signal bluesiness, it's precisely that same impulse. "Look! Now it's me doing it! I'm the soulful bluesy singer!"

It's most flagrant with political speeches. Every politician gives the same speech. The words scarcely matter, because the politician has nothing particularly important to say. He's there just to be That Guy with the haircut at the podium giving The Speech. "Now it's me! I'm giving the speech!" At rare moments where the words actually matter, they can't rise to the occasion because shallow preening is all they've got. The posing tourist, revealed.

I've often noted that most singers become singers because they want to be singers, not because they want to sing.

But this is not really about singers.

Also, I'm getting ready to nix "most".

Further reading: "The Crux of Creativity"


Followup posting: "How Posing Tourists Wreck Everything From Scones to Government"

Yogis

I've never met a yogi.

I've met many people performing yoga theater, but not one yogi.

How do I define it? With unusual tolerance. Just two simple asks:

1. You invest 99% or less of your energy into ego gratification (with — and this is critical — a downward trend), and

2. You spend 99% or less of your time posing (with a downward trend).

Instead, they grow egomaniacal about their glorious egolessness (awareness of pride ---> pride of awareness), and they strike a flamboyant pose of non-pretension. In other words: yoga theater.

When someone informs you they are "spiritual", it's helpful to hear the opposite. All you know for certain is that a pellet of gluten might fucking kill them. And if they've metastasized to the point where they display perma-smiles, soften their voices to a velvety hush, and thrust forward the deep, vast, profound pools that are their eyes in the same way a stripper would proffer her tits, best to steer clear. Spirituality claims to renounce image-signaling, while such people run the opposite way, full-speed. Which is scary.

Last week I visited a vegetarian cafe run by a stern, authoritarian, gaunt older woman with white-lady dreadlocks. A sign was hung front and center for all those entering: "This is a sacred space."

I tried not to grin, or to smirk, or to laugh uproariously, but failed miserably in a cascade. After surveying the plates of food, which looked unloving and harsh, I quickly beat it out of the space of her sacredness.

Imagine announcing to the world that you've created a Sacred Space. What are you saying about yourself?


The great teacher Nisargadatta, author of the classic "I am That," stressed, above all, sincerity. Funny how none of his many followers ever seem to talk about that part.

The Plain-Sight Secret About Investing

I'm replaying this posting from April, 2021


99% of investors have no idea what the bet is that they're making. It's shocking.

"Elon Musk seems super smart, and he's had so much success in the past, and his future plans sound exciting. Tesla seems like an awfully good bet!"

No. Don't do that. The purchase of Tesla stock is not a bet on the company, like betting on a horse in a race. It's one level more sophisticated and abstract: you are betting on the underestimation of Tesla by other investors. That's the bet; the only bet. You're never betting on a company, you're betting against other investors' sentiment about that company. And those people are all aware of Musk's history, too. That's not privileged information.

Have you ever noticed that many people imagine that when they say the same old shit we've all heard a zillion times it has a special ring? "Now it's me saying it!" In everyday life, this daffy mental miscalculation is annoying. In the stock market, it pays for the 1%'s Lear jets.

This is, oddly, terrifically difficult for nearly everyone to grok. Small time "retail" investors misunderstand because they're naive (naïveté is the single greatest impediment to clarity). Day traders, who grok this in theory, lose touch with it amid the bustle of their manic and complicated trading (complexity is the second greatest impediment to clarity). And professional financiers, who understand this better than any of us, are distracted by their smug self-confidence (ego is the third greatest impediment to clarity).

Most of all, it's a framing problem. If you're an addicted gambler (as most investors are, at all three levels), you do not possess a lithe perspective (see this for how addiction is a framing problem). You are rigid and stuck. You are compelled to see things like a horse track, and can't find the calm latitude to reframe to a more sophisticated, subtle, abstract perspective. Your attention remains riveted to "GO TEAM,” in all-caps. 

We all have an opinion as to whether Amazon still has room to grow, or if Tesla can maintain profits with big automakers getting into electric. Opinions are like assholes; we all have one. And yours may even be correct. But that's not enough. Because your bet is not on Amazon or Tesla, but against titans infinitely smarter and better informed than you. They effectively set the price, and that price already reflects their (smart) consensus opinion. And there's not a single thought in your head that's ahead of them. So you will not only not win against them; they will, over time, eat your lunch.

So don't read annual reports. Don't try to be a smarty. All info is already baked in to the price by people way smarter than you (if you assume no one's smarter than you, then I have good news: your impending poverty will divest you of that delusion). Again: You're not betting on a company, you're betting against the market's estimation of that company. It's not a proposition of predicting business success.

So why would anyone bet against billionaire geniuses and their office towers stocked full of MIT educated analysts? Wouldn't that be crazy?

Yes. Yes it would. Which is why people should invest in index mutual funds, which rise (and, alas, sink) with the market, often bringing even better success than the outcomes for individual twitchy billionaire geniuses (because the latter are limited by ego and an addict’s perspective).

The only exception is if you have some sort of an edge. Which 99.9999% of the time you won't.

Patience is a potent edge. The billionaire geniuses need to be constantly hitting home runs. They can't patiently wait stuff out. They're twitchy. That's why my strategy of buying Apple in its downturns has worked. I can park my money for a year, and those guys can't. Neither can day traders, who are equally twitchy. So, often, it's only sad little me buying on downturns and selling on peaks, while everyone else spazzes out, flocks irrationally, and goes foolishly the wrong way. They’re pursuing bazooka home runs this quarter while I’m content with 25% gains next year. I gobble up discarded crumbs.

Specialized knowledge can also be an edge. A friend runs a genetics lab, and told me TXG's technology would one day be ubiquitous. He could hardly wait to have it, himself. I bought at $54, and it's now $188. Of course, it might just as easily have crashed. Maybe the CEO is a dork. An edge is not a superpower, it's just a way to marginally de-shmuck oneself. Billionaire geniuses also know people running genetics labs. Mostly, I got lucky. But a little luckier than if I'd flown blind, trusting my own puny acumen.

Years ago, I wrote breathlessly about SIGA, a company with an entirely effective (and no side-effects) smallpox cure. It’s a bio-terror countermeasure (it works on weaponized versions), and it also works on cowpox and monkey pox, which are both still out there. I'm still hanging on to half my shares, and at $7 I've made out decently with my $2 investment, though it's sat listlessly for so many years that it's no jackpot. This year I expect at least one big foreign government sale, and/or a sale to US gov with a different formulation, which should hopefully pop the stock back to $12-15. At that point, I'll sell (there's time pressure: their patent on the drug actually runs out in a few years - insert bug-eyed/astonished emoji - and soon I'll be so old that I'd only enjoy a jackpot by gold-plating my walker), and it will amount to good profit despite the ridiculous time lag. In this case, my patience was my edge, then my stubbornness was my edge, then my religious faith was my edge, and, at this point, my stupidity is my edge. All these things are unavailable to billionaire geniuses. I stay in my lane.

It’s hard to understand this maxim, and harder still to live by it. And it’s almost impossible to find an edge for yourself, and harder still to maximize that edge without being clouded by ego or by addictive glee over successes. 

I seem to be at that latter stage. I’ve been beating the market (I bought in low to CRIS, PRKR, BCRX, and the aforementioned TXG and SIGA, in addition to cultivating Apple’s periodic lulls). But it’s more than likely a blip, like flipping “heads” a few times more than likely. So I’m keeping my outlay prudently low. 

Infinite Wealth, Baby

I'm spending very little here in the land of 12€ lunches, 30€ doctor visits, 200€/month health insurance payments, 50€/month condo fees, 4€ 15 minute Uber rides, 35€ grocery bills and 1€ wine carafes. And my health, while stable, isn't such that I foresee 20-30 years of hearty functionality. So, per this posting about the non-linearity of spending with age, I've been trying to enjoy a little more and relax my spending limits. All the saving and sacrifice I've done (more than most people, I believe) ought to lead to something while I'm still able to enjoy it. Now's the time.

The result has been surprising. I had to be in Lisbon for a 7am appointment, so I booked a hotel. And I chose a really nice one (paradoxially, in one of my most impoverished eras I was put up by promotors at five star European lodgings while on jazz festival tours, developing a taste for nice hotels). It was...nice. Oh, and my favorite film director just released a blu-ray in USA only, so I paid Amazon an extra $30 to send it across the Atlantic. And....that's about it.

Sometimes when my socks feel unfresh I switch mid-day, knowing it will increase wear and tear (having been quite poor for a long time, that will never not set off mental alarms). "Spendin' money!" I boast cheerily to the empty room, a big shot flinging slighty wilted footwear into the hamper.

So, figuring a dollar's depreciation on the socks plus blu-ray and hotel, I've lavished a splendid 331€ on myself this year above/beyond basics.

I decided to try harder. "I am infinitely wealthy," I announced to the audience previously awed by my sock performance. But nothing's happened. Though I feel no deprivation aside from the ironic let-down of finally removing dampers only to discover that the engine needn't race.

Me & You

If you evade the commands of a control freak, they'll see you as trying to control them.

Similarly, egomaniacs view assertion as challenge.

I used to wonder why a book explaining "I'm OK – You're OK" needed to be written, much less sell 15 million copies to readers stunned by the gleaming insight.

But I've also wondered why the Golden Rule is widely seen as loftily unattainable.

Rebel Conformity

Political extremists often criticize moderates for being dull and boring. My experience is the opposite.

Every progressive and every MAGA sings pretty much the same song. But while moderates sing less flamboyantly, they often have unique views they express in freshly personal ways.


Millions feel genuinely maverick for their interest in "indie-rock" or "independent cinema". I don't even understand how those terms can be used unironically at this point, but the culture has pivoted to accept flocks of dull slobs grasping at formulaic banality to feign nonconformity.

My Own Internal Portugal

Portugal is a country of charming, acceptable sloppiness where there is no patience whatsoever for YOUR sloppiness because everyone's entirely fed up with the pervasive sloppiness (including, of course, their own). Any gaffe you make will break the camel's back.

And I'm experiencing my own internal Portugal as old age increases my likelihood of creating problems for myself in direct proportion to my impatience with self-created problems.

Instagramism

I'm finally reaching a point of clarity after 40 years of avid chowhounding — tens of thousands of restaurant meals in two dozen countries plus three years coming to grips with having gotten "what I'd wished for." Having landed on point in the epicenter of sublime grandma cooking, I've been increasingly desperate for cooking with precision and refinement.

I devour amply soulful €11 lunches daily, cooked by octogenarian Portuguese grandmas in the country's one happy town, enduring unpeeled fava beans (extract with your teeth, like artichoke leaves), un-cored baked apples (cut around it), well-done meats, and a staunchly limited repertoire referred to, in hushed religious tones, as "comida tradicional Portuguesa".

In my desperate seeking for precision and refinement, my impulse is to up-pay. Will someone who's actually trained as a chef please charge me egregiously so I can get a break from this unremitting flood of precisely what I've always wanted?

I haven't found this in Portugal. The swanky places in Lisbon feel...off. They're like photocopies of imitations of real restaurants. Thinly unconvincing attempts to wow via presentation, while the cooking has no extra nuance or touch at all. They'll gladly scoop wads of cash from your wallet, but the value-added is drizzly sauces, track lighting, and snazzy tall stacking. In a word: Instagramism.

I figured this was because Portugal is so steeped in grandma cooking that anyone aspiring to charge over 11€/cover skips other options and goes straight to Instagramism. Deliciousness means grandma, while fancy means photography.

But I'm finding this even outside of Portugal (but without the strong "grandma" stratum). And, come to think of it, this scenario was arising in America before I left. The world shot by me, and I'm only just noticing.

The age-old problem in food service has always been justifying premium. We all know that ingredients are cheap and fire is free, so the entire history of dining can be told as an increasingly elaborate effort to coax the johns into paying extra. So, really, Instagramism was present all along. Starchy linen tablecloths, well-attired fawning staff, careful plating on fine china and swanky jazz soundtracks "set a higher tone" long before the Internet arose. Such psy-ops were contrived in late 19th century France, and photogenic allure is just the latest gambit for spellbinding diners into up-paying.

But the food in linen tablecloth places used to at least sometimes be skillfully cooked, because at least a few customers — beyond preoccupation with status, trendiness and sensation — were also tasting with discernment. Now, much less so. Diners want to "bag" their photographic scores and display them like trophy mounts. While they still use the language of ingestion, it's flattened into "yum," the mindlessly visceral assessment one might translate from an eager hog deep into his feed.

Grease, check. Salt, check. Great photo. Yum!

So it's not that I'm caught in a uniquely Portuguese dining trap. It's that I'm experiencing gastronomic phantom limb pain. Because the choices now are 1. sloppy soulful (or less soulful slop), or 2. food that looks totally YUM. Ambitious operators are, naturally, drawn to the current luxury signifier: making food shiny and photogenic.

Jesus' Phone Number

I was suggesting local restaurants to a Portuguese friend. Suddenly, he had an idea to bounce off of me.

"Isn't it a shame there's no app that gives you surefire food tips wherever you go?"

I winced painfully and told him that I'd created that once. I gathered an unusually expert group of food lovers to swap tips and answer questions, and it eventually scaled so large that a staggering number of obscure nooks and crannies were explored and accounted for. He asked me for a download link, and I told him this was all a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

It would never work for Portugal, I explained, because here people mostly eat at the same lunch hole for decades, and the same special occasion place their parents and grandparents frequented. Lunch is at the place closest to home or work, and no one here would ever try the place two corners down. I work very much against the tide by exploring the full landscape of options. Since hardly anyone chowhounds (understandable, given that no country more richly rewards dining complacency), there are no savvy opinions to create an app around.

I didn't expect him to register that he'd received a reply from perhaps the most qualified person to answer that particular question. But I figured my response was reasonably interesting and persuasive. And here's how he responded:

After listening politely, he waited a beat and continued. "But, yeah, no, wouldn't it be great if there was an *app*—you know, like a smart phone app!—which would tell you the good places to eat?"

Is this mic on? Can anyone hear me? Did I not just say words? I could swear I just said words!

This, alas, seems to be the new normal. Not just with food, I mean with any topic. Way back in elementary school, I recognized that communication was a suspension-of-disbelief proposition. But over the years, it's either decayed still further, or else I'm noticing more clearly what was always true.

In either case, I've reached an extreme Twilight Zone scenario where it feels as if the humans were swapped out with insensate wraiths so lost in inner fog that they can't parse a word. No one seems able to process new information. Like early computers, we process only stock statements phrased within rigid semantic constraints—and then output pre-fab answers. It's like punch cards (and it's hilarious that we find chatbots—which can actually take a point and reply on-track—fakely superficial).

If I were to offer a devout Christian Jesus' personal cellphone number, he'd stare blankly as I spoke the numbers, not bothering to write them down. Then he'd graciously thank me for the information with the words he customarily uses for gracious thanks, going on to say some of the canned things he always says...like a video game character ("Evening, friend! What's your pleasure?" pipes up the burly bartender as you scour his medieval tavern for hidden treasure maps).

I haven't had a conversation that could pass a Turing Test in a very long time. To be sure, I've exchanged stock statements within rigid semantic constraints and been offered pre-fab replies, whereupon I feigned pleasurable engagement. More often, people drift entirely past my point as I offer them exactly what they'd professed to be interested in. Even if they'd hit a sweet spot where I could offer an authoritative reply. Or Jesus' phone number.

Happily, there's a lot of delicious food out there. And terrific movies and TV. Plus all the free sunlight and oxygen we could possibly want. We are so free and safe and healthy and comfortable and entertained as to be the envy of our ancestors, who sigh from their graves at our good fortune. But even in their repose, they're better conversationalists than we are.