The Hardest Ask

The problem with wisdom is that, if it doesn't completely confuse us (because we've been looking the other way for so long that a fresh framing leaves us as overwhelmed as newborn babies), it feels so natural—so tuned to body temperature—that we're not at all stricken. It digests so easily that we needn't chew or swallow. It merely metabolizes, vanishing without a trace.

I know a person who has remained a sulky, superior, utterly non-productive adolescent for nearly 70 years. Risking her snarling wrath, I once spoke the words she most needed to hear. They were her missing chunk, like oranges to a scurvied sailor; like a simple key to a seemingly intransigent lock. It's a maxim I've repeated here several times:

Registering stupidity doesn't make you smart; it just means you're observant.

Her reply was "Yeah, of course."

And...cut! Oranges: flippantly tossed overboard. Key: melted in the heat of the lock. Tableau: untouched. The answer blew in the wind, but who clocks a light breeze?

That self-vanishing snippet of breezy nothingness (along with its equally disposable corollaries, below) may be key insights for averting the clash we all feel coming, but I already know the response: "Yeah, of course."

Yet let's continue. Here are the corollaries:

Registering evil doesn't make you good.

Registering authoritarianism doesn't make you democratic

Spotting immorality doesn't make you virtuous.

The hardest ask in all creation is for narcissists to examine themselves first.

Our ancestors toiled and bled to push us, their spoiled children, into a paradise of wealth and comfort, never seeing that a society of narcissistic aristocrats will inherently be doomed.

Addendum

I've added a new closer to yesterday's posting, "Pancakes; Divorce; Pancakes".

Pancakes; Divorce; Pancakes

I once wrote about the clear-headed, peaceful state yogis call satchitananda, often translated as "equanimity", though I prefer "bulletproof". It's a state of undisturbable and ineffable peace, non-reactive yet empathically engaged, and utterly tolerant even upon choosing to argue. Lots of paradoxes make it notoriously slippery to describe, but, again, "bulletproof" gives the right idea. And I'd like to offer some thoroughly enjoyable homework for those curious for better understanding.

Watch "Pancakes; Divorce; Pancakes", season 1, episode 3 of "Review", available on Amazon for $2.99.

Reality TV host Forest MacNeil is challenged to eat "an upsetting number of pancakes" (like a dozen), and he barely accomplishes it with histrionic displeasure. Then he proceeds to ruin his marriage for the stupidest reasons. And then, as the third act of his busy day, he's challenged to eat 30 additional pancakes...and does so post-haste and without complaint, in a state of numbly crestfallen indifference.

You really need to watch it. Not only is it entirely hilarious, but the ancient saintly authors of the Hindu Vedas would have tossed flower petals at creator Andy Daley's feet. Watch it, enjoy the hell out of it, and then ponder the power of framing.

Satchitananda is like the high indifference of Forest's third act, but without the needless overlay of disgust, negativity, and numbness. Indifference need not be negative. One can poselessly eat the damned pancakes, in one's raw state with nothing left to lose, but (this is the essential part!!!) without making it dramatic just because drama's the normal move.

Indifference sans drama is freedom. Blissful (yes, blissful) stresslessness. Days that should feel horrible are still nice days. Emotions happen—you don't numb yourself—but there's no suffering. You're bulletproof.

This isn't repression, denial, or dissociation. Those things inevitably generate even more stress. We're talking about real happiness—the stuff we find innumerable clever ways to suppress. We're talking about Forest MacNeil's third act but without the gratuitous self-torment.

"Freedom" is a state of infinite potential, which feels exactly like "having nothing left to lose." It's easy enough to get there. In fact, you've surely been there! But you need to decline the conditioned reflex to find it lacking, or infuriating, or devastating. That's an effortless opt-out, but you need to remember to do it, and remembering is as common as quintuplets all winning the lottery.

It took me years to settle into recognizing the necessity of this laughably easy step. But now, as I presently deal with profound loss, and am sad and shakey, I'm not suffering. Rather than hunker down into self-care, I've hastened (yesterday and today) to my keyboard to channel the wrenching into an attempt to be helpful. Not as some noble aspiration; just a frame of mind. Satchitananda compels helping rather than bewailing. One's settings toggle to "useful ingenuity", rather than "dramatic performance".


Addendum:

Some people are hell-bent on descent because they innately sense the liberation that comes with having, again, NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE. The problem is that they don't know quite what to do with it, so they spin it into drama. They don't know to opt out of that part.

What can you do with freedom? Anything. I mean it literally when I say that freedom means infinite potential—even while buck naked and penniless. You can even eat 30 pancakes, no problem.


I made the same point, much more tersely, here (and this is a helpful offshoot). Numbly, glaringly giving up is kissing cousin to blissful spiritual transformation. You merely have to decline the numbness and glaring—and it's a surprisingly easy opt-out, if you can just remember. The ease of it is perhaps the single biggest and most ironic surprise in the entire human experience for the handful per generation who are sufficiently playfully nonconformist under enormous pressure to try it. But you don't need those unicorn attributes, because you've just been handed the secret on a platter. And you can remember more easily because you've just been reminded.

Lifebuilding

Someone in my circle has been swallowed by the fate I’m about to warn you about. Perhaps my harshly-awakened perspective might help a reader or two escape the trap. Urgent work is required. Clocks are ticking.


Hardly anyone plans for old age in non-financial ways. We count on momentum, supposing our 70s will be like our 60s, only slower. Loving spouse, dear friends, and adoring children will encircle us, like in a movie, and we'll venture forward as the culmination of a lifetime of general effort.

But that's cinematic baloney. It never works out that way. You may be forced to move. Your spouse might leave you, or get sick, or die. Such dark exigencies seem too horrid to contemplate, but that's the point! We avoid level-headed calculation, resorting to pipe dreams about momentum pulling us through old age. It's the height of foolish complacency.

When has life ever gone exactly as it did in your cinematic mental projection? How could you possibly think complacency would be a smart strategy on this planet?

Movie moments don't last, and you've had a lifetime to notice this and to plan accordingly. We're relentlessly and violently pushed toward that realization. Youth and middle age are brutal training grounds. At some point, we're supposed to stop engaging in childish dreamy fantasy and get real.

When things fall apart in our 20s or 30s or 40s or 50s—as they do with frequency—we have the energy, flexibility, and initiative to regroup and pursue new directions. But that's much harder when you're older. And by late middle age we should see that coming and finally internalize the boy scout credo about being prepared. If your "preparation" consists of imagining yourself sailing on easy momentum, a healthy IRA, and an upbeat attitude, you'll have doomed yourself to misery.

But it will not be the misery you imagine. I don't mean the moment of frozen horror when the bottom drops out. Hell, that's the easy part! The real problem is the day after fragile plans are dashed. And the day after that. And thousands more empty days, still here, with dwindling energy and diminishing options.

That's what you need to avoid, with all your might.

Don't rely on fragility.

Build solid footing for yourself. Internal solid footing!

If you don't, you'll have decades to rue your failure to conjure raisons d'être. You will back-load via regret what should have been front-loaded via careful planning. And, chillingly, I don't know a single person who's doing—or done—any such prep work.

Let's build the list. You need pursuits that bring satisfaction, and more than one, because if it's bird watching, you're screwed when you lose your vision, and if it's sports, you're screwed when you develop arthritis, and if it's joking around with your longtime buddy, you're screwed when he moves or gets sick or dies—or merely decides he doesn't like you anymore. You need multiple outlets and avenues and contacts. You need richness, and that's on you to accumulate over the long decades. That's what that lifetime was for!

And it all must be real, not just propositional. We can all produce lists of pseudo-hobbies, pseudo-passions, and pseudo-friends, but often they're placeholders. The karaoke machine you rarely set up but have wonderful memories of using once or twice will not cut it. You ought to have been building an actual life all this time.

You might have imagined family would be your grounding center, but if you really expected grown children to be constant presences, investing your day-to-day life with energy and meaning, you've contrived a movie moment, not a life.

You need friends...at least if you're not a serious introvert (in which case you'll have even greater need of things that bring you satisfaction, as well as backups). If you reach age 70 without everyday friends, you'd better have backup plans to your backup plans, because your friend-making muscles will have atrophied, and old people are not easily befriended.

Another addition to your to-build list: the ability to reframe. You can develop a facility for shifting perspective, making your mind an interesting and useful place rather than a torture chamber once things turn quiet and you find yourself marinating in your thoughts. This is more advanced than building social networks and interest palettes, but the return on investment is enormous.

YOU NEED A LIFE, and will no longer have busyness, buzzing alarms, and due dates to hide behind. No one will provide you with a life, nor can you buy one. You and you alone are responsible for building a life full of rich options and fallbacks and friends and outlets and perspectives. You had decades to do so, but, wherever you're at, you can start RIGHT NOW! Today!

Very few people seem to enter old age with A Life. They've merely navigated the obstacle course, ticking off to-dos and acquiring abstract rewards. It all feels like you're building momentum, but if you've built upon fragility with mere abstract notions, so it's all propositional, you'll have many years to bitterly recognize your failure. I know one such person who, being an introvert, was reasonably ok sitting in a chair in an empty silent room for twenty years. But I know another who, alas, was not.

Get going like your life depends on it. For further inspiration, this Slog has spent 17 years essentially gaming it all out. It's full of encouragement and perspectives on building an inner life and a lithe re-framing faculty.


Addenda:

1. Here's an example. Say your mom dies in your 60s (which is typical) and she was your confidant (reasonably typical). A few years later, your husband develops Alzheimer's (not uncommon). You flail for support, but you've neglected to build any. Your children love you, but, unlike the Hallmark ads, they're not perpetually right there with you, because they have busy lives, themselves. You never bothered to make close friends, you never had real hobbies or passions, and, in your perennially busy and numbly distracted younger years, you never learned to pliantly shift perspective. Unable to choose your own framings, you must passively accept how it's all been placed by circumstance. So you're looking down the barrel at 10 or 20 years as a wraith in a silent house where the phone rings once or twice per week. You recognize that you failed to build an inner life for yourself, and are too fraught and aggrieved to imaginably start doing so at this late date.

I'm truly sorry to foist you so viscerally into this frightful scenario. But the tough love is well-intended. I want you to avoid this.

2. The "momentum" I'm talking about—the false notion that your long track record of busyness and asset acquisition and networking will compile into a solidity you can hold onto and live off of in later quiet moments—is identical to what I described—prophetically last week—as the horribly wrong notion that being the irrepressible "Aunt Marge" in some narrow setting spares you from needing to ever be just plain Marge for a world at large—and for yourself.

3. I will never understand why people think immortality would be a good thing. I suppose that would be the hail mary play for a race of people who cannot, for the life of them, stop kicking cans down the road. Homes will get infinitely large to store our garbagey bullshit, and lifespans will get infinitely long to provide more time to finally get around to really living.

Why Aunt Marge Can't Be Just Marge

Aunt Marge has lost a step or two, but that's fine. Everyone loves her, and we're just so glad she's still here with us!

But here's what you don't know.

Assuming Aunt Marge isn't demented or wholly incompetent...

And she just gets a little feisty when things don't quite go her way...

And drops sullenly out of conversations...

And is stuck in her ways due to a comfort zone the size of a cherry pit...

And speaks her salty mind a bit, heh, forthrightly...

...the unrecognized truth is that none of this is inevitable.

Aunt Marge isn't helplessly dragged into this behavior by advancing age. You might not want to hear this, but she's doing it because she can get away with it. We celebrate Aunt Marge for simply being Aunt Marge, and she spends extravagantly from that immense credit. Older people grow lazy because we let them get away with it, respecting them—or, at least, the proposition of them—regardless.

You'd do the same if those around you celebrated the mere idea of you without expecting you to prove yourself. If you could get away without earning the attention you expect from others, you'd stop making the effort, too. Not trying feels like a vacation!

But then, what the hell am I supposed to do?

Just as young people wind up at the kid's table, people my age find themselves bundled with the Olds. And it has puzzled me profoundly that they have so little to offer. I don't ask much—and I'm not relentlessly judging—but very few people over age 60 seem the least bit interesting, smart, funny, kind, generous, or even just pleasant to be around. I have better conversations with my rhododendron! And I'm not talking about decrepits. I mean people as strong as bulls who talk a blue streak—but have nothing to offer. Nada. Zip. It's so strange.

It's notoriously hard for old people to make new friends. We chalk it up to age discrimination or general "marginalization". But, no, that's not it. It's because Aunt Marge is so used to coasting on being Aunt Marge that she has no idea how to be just Marge. And there's no self-awareness, just confusion, leaving her feeling oddly entitled to engagement, friendship, and eager ears for her low-effort blandness.

Nothing is offered and everything is expected when you imagine you're seen as That Person, obliviously coasting on canned personhood. But the magic doesn't work with newcomers, and it's been a long time since you earned your way. Or made the slightest effort to be interesting or pleasant. Or, really, anything.

So I keep finding myself saddled with Just-Plain-Marges who expect to seem compelling because they're That Irrepressible Person. But, outside one's musty, established circles, effort is necessary. Rise from complacency, constrain stridency, and try to follow conversational context (i.e. don't just blurt out the stuff you usually say)!

Uh-uh. I've rarely met a senior the least bit interested in pulling off that baseline trifecta of everyday solicitude. And, dear God, I hope I'm not obliviously falling into the same trap.


Why do seniors repeat the same stories endlessly? It's not memory loss. It's that they feel entitled to inflict this on you if they bloody well feel like it. It's so much nastier and more callous and self-indulgent than you'd ever imagined. The truth is an absolute horror.

All posts tagged "Aging", in reverse-chronological order.

Fixing a Bad Back

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".


After twenty years of very avid work, I've developed a remarkably easy fix for a bad back.

It's mostly preventative. It might help during a flare-up, or might not. But if you'll practice it once or twice daily (it takes about 10 seconds), it can help inoculate you from the problem.

Let's talk about The Problem. In my case—and, I'm told, most people's cases—the issue is an asymmetry, aka pelvic torsion, which temporarily causes one leg to extend further than the other. It doesn't show up on MRIs or x-rays, and orthopedists don't have it on their radar. It's the "x factor" behind many mysterious back problems, and conditions like sciatica are often "downstream" from this, so it might help there, too.

Physical therapists and good massage therapists know about this issue, and can offer temporary help. But there's no cure for it beyond their ongoing involvement. Until now.

The Technique
Lie down on top of a foam yoga block laid flat and rotated like a "|", not a "——". It should extend from your sacrum to support the buttocks.

Gently shift your hips left and right over the block about ten times. It's fine if they shift off the block at the extreme of movement, but your feet and chest should stay relatively still. You may hear or feel a "pop" as the structures realign, and it shouldn't hurt.

If I don't do this twice daily, I'm vulnerable. A heavy lift or sudden turn can trigger crippling back pain. But if I keep up the practice, I'm golden.

Add-Ons
1. Try a forward bend first.

This helps prepare the area for adjustment. If your hamstrings are tight, stretch forward over a bed, arms extended forward onto the mattress. Try to relax your abdomen, which will probably be tensed. That may help you descend further, but depth doesn't matter. Just give yourself a good stretch.

2. Heat Helps

A heating pad, hot bath, or even a warm shower will help loosen the lower back and buttocks so realignment happens more easily.

3. Ungrip Your Glutes

Tight glutes resist realignment. A tennis ball can help. Set one on the floor and sit on it—cross legged or with legs extended—avoiding the dead center of your hip socket. Gently work the ball to and fro, paying extra attention to tight spots, gradually tracing a circle around that midpoint. Then repeat with a wider circle, and then work the other buttock, and then try the yoga block again.

Done right, this should take about 15 minutes, and you may need to repeat it once/day until the area permanently relaxes. From that point, you'll only need occasional maintenance.

Caveats
I've done yoga for 45 years.

This may not work as well for you right away. But the motion is gentle, the effort is minimal, and it takes just 10 seconds. So long as you follow caveat #2, it's certainly worth a try.

Consult a professional.

If you’ve had spinal surgery, structural abnormalities, or conditions like degeneration or stenosis, you should be under medical care already—and you should definitely ask first.

If you just have a "bad back", this may work well for you. It has limited usefulness during an acute flare-up, though. Try it if you want, but you may get better results by seeing a good massage therapist or physical therapist, and then try this once you're feeling better.

Eddie Palmieri

The great Eddie Palmieri, one of my musical heroes and a formative superstar of Latin Jazz/Salsa/Whatever You Want to Call it, died yesterday.

I'll offer two stories:

Fumigation
I'm at the bar of Blue Note nightclub in Manhattan, circa 1987. I'm an insider there because I play almost nightly at the late after show with trumpeter Ted Curson. Michel Camillo, the latest big-publicity jazz star, is in residence, and he's busily and smilingly outgassing the smoothest and show-off-iest latin-ish jazz imaginable. A friend of mine refers to this style of playing as "Show You My White Teeth Music". The tourists are eating it up, but we musicians at the bar, seeking any possible relief, begin drinking with determination.

The set ends, thunderous ovation, and we eagerly await the second half of the show, featuring Eddie Palmieri's Orchestra. It's a bit like Sandra Bernhardt following Jennifer Lopez. Eddie was not dentally impressive, and his music did not drip with showy glissandi. No smug rich guy suntanned sambas. Eddie was the apotheosis of soulful grit. Eddie was antimatter to Camillo.

The mangy musicians from Eddie's group finally took the stage, tuned, and sat placidly waiting for the drugs to wax or wane, per individual preference. Then Eddie came out, and, as he often did, launched into an extended solo piano intro. Eddie can get quite "out", making Thelonious Monk seem songful by comparison. He always had the soul of an avante gardist, though, unlike just about every avante gardist I know (and I knew many), he could also swing his ass off. But on this night, he played 20 minutes of impenetrable, maddening solo stuff, giving the tourists nothing to hang their ears on. Nada. On and on it went, featuring repeated piddly hammerings on the highest piano key, making the dressing room cat mew loudly in consternation. A number of audience members walked out, though no one in the band could give less of a crap. They just sat there mopily with misaligned pupils, waiting.

Finally—FINALLY—Eddie stands up (adding maybe four inches to his seated height) and screams "ONE TWO THREE FOUR!!!!" fast, and the band just roars into a montuno from a dead standing start that's so instantly swinging and wailing and exasperated (by Camillo) that the entire room forgets to breathe for a solid minute. Whatever it is that metal heads get from having their ears blown out by garish rednecks and their overclocked guitar amps, this was the platonic form of that. This was the mythical Wall of Sound.

The interminable solo had been fumigation. And then the heavy roller machine had gone into overdrive, laying down fresh, inexorable pavement. I actually teared up a little from the emotional release. If only orgasms offered such catharsis!

Dominican Humiliation
My one gig with Eddie was a catastrophe (more for him than for me). We were playing in a brand new Dominican nightclub in Washington Heights, and while you might imagine The Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico as geographic and cultural twins, their musics are like oil and water.

Dominicans dance to merengue, an easy 1-2, 1-2, 1-2 like polka. It's fast and furious and sexy and exciting, but not the least bit sophisticated. Puerto Rican salsa (which derives from Cuba, and, before that, Africa) can be furious, sexy and exciting at times, but it abounds with sophistication and subtlety.

Those not born into it (or made it their lifelong study, as I did) wouldn't be able to even clap their hands to it. Imagine that! Popular music—dance music!—you can't clap your hands to! It's not 1-2, 1-2, 1-2. Instead, it's two short claps and three long. Or three long and two short. And even knowing which is which is a move for insiders only. The difference with Dominican merengue was yet another matter/anti-matter contrast.

So I'm gigging with the greatest salsa band in the world, hideously misplaced in a Dominican nightclub (hey, a gig's a gig, you know? It's not like Eddie's manager would ever say "no"!) and no one is dancing, or applauding, because this crazy Puerto Rican stuff is happening which none of the Dominicans can parse. It's like trying to play a Windows game on a Mac. One of the greatest moments of my life is an abject humiliation for all concerned.

There had, however, been a high point the week before. The rehearsal for this gig marked the first appearance of the young conga player Giovanni Hidalgo, who'd arrived with a reputation as a genius. As he and I both warmed up across the room from each other, separated by over a dozen other honking horn players, his complicated hand slaps suddenly and improbably began to encompass my warm-up. Not that he was tuning in to me, specifically, getting all up in my stuff. it's just that he was a Big Ears Guy, never not listening to—and never not encompassing—Everything. I was the same (most players wouldn't have noticed they were being encompassed). When I engaged back, it was like Fred Astaire cocking an elbow at Ginger Rogers. He complied instantaneously and sumptuously. Beautifully. The back/forth continued for a couple minutes until Eddie hollered to start the rehearsal. Giovanni went on to become a major star, and we'll leave it at that because his story became too sad to contemplate. Best damn warm-up I ever had, though.

Back to the Dominican club, it's intermission and I'm standing in a stairwell, playing long tones to keep myself in optimal condition, when Eddie walks by and offers me a hit off his joint. I refuse with a smile, saying I need to keep my head straight on my first gig. Eddie shrugs amiably and walks away. God, I'm an idiot.

Rest in Peace, Eddie.


Are you noticing a pattern?

The HVAC Lie

So let's talk about HVACs. I just spent a significant fraction of my savings on a few of them. I bought nice Bosch units. They're overpowered for their rooms' sizes, but there's no choice. You cannot buy decent quality small HVACS in Europe. Installers don't even understand the concept of 'overpowered'. "It's Bosch! Top of the line! You'll love it! It does everything!"

I recalled, deep in my brain, serious problems with overpowered ACs, but I couldn't remember specifics...until they were up and running. Let's cut to the atrocious upshot:

1. HVAC splits do not, and cannot, draw in outside air. It's like putting your home in a Ziploc bag. You know how musty and unpleasant it gets when you leave your car on "Max AC" too long? That's your life now.

2. There is a "Fan" function, but it just blows the stale inside air around.

3. I finally remembered the issue: overpowered units don't run long enough to dehumidify. You get cool and clammy. To kill humidity, you'd need to set a super low temperature and put on a parka.

4. But wait! There's a "Dry" mode that dehumidifies! Bullshit. It just cools less efficiently, ignoring whatever temperature you may have set. It will run and run until humidity drops, whereupon you and your family will be icy corpses.

The solution, suggested by ChatGPT, is to also buy a window fan to pull in fresh air, and a dehumidifier to dry it, and then run the HVAC to cool. And I am super stoked to buy all that equipment after gushing cash on these HVAC units. Also, the decor aspect will be fabulous, with multiple snorting boxes attending to my atmospherics. Maybe I'll order the CERN package, used to keep the Large Hadron Collider on-point.

Remember those ungainly inefficient 80 decibel boxes we used to hang outside our windows? Ancient history. These modern beauties are a mere triple the price, and they DO EVERYTHING.

Cruelty Laundering

Nothing feels cleaner than a just precept providing cover for dark impulses.

“Cruelty laundering”—the license to destroy with good conscience and to misbehave in the name of righteousness—has been the eternal delight of psychopaths and narcissists on both the Left and Right.

Sins and Sinners

Yesterday, I wrote:

The hard right, which spent decades screaming and hollering about pedophilia, is largely cool with pardoning arguably the biggest monster of the biggest child sex trafficking ring in modern history.

The hard left, which spent decades screaming and hollering about rape, is largely cool with Hamas raping Jewish Israeli women.

Everyone's just posing. Signifying. Waving flags and feeling righteous in their mouthy stand. Peel back the skin, and it's brute tribalism. Hatred for the Other is the only real thing. The sole motivator.

Performative virtue, as the fruit of a poisoned tree, cannot help but be hypocritical and spotty.

So what's the answer? How do we fix this?

As ever, it will happen by each person individually reframing. Here's the recipe, and it will seem both radical and profoundly familiar:

If you have a conviction that seems so incontrovertible that it appears to justify full-on seething emotion, and your white-hot fury feels right because it serves Righteousness so you feel elevated in your screechy, mouthy scorn as you smite the wicked without observing the normal considerations....maybe pull back a little. Maybe don't do that.

We can fight perceived wickedness with an emotional pitch of "8", rather than "10" or "11", and do so with ordinary civilized restraints fully in place. The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind, and has been for thousands of years. 2.5 billion of us profess to practice it already. Here it is:

While fighting what you're certain is Wickedness from a position you're certain is Rightness (I won't ask you to moderate your certainty; that would be a step too far), you can hate the sin while loving the sinner.

Of course, we're only two millennia into that proposition, so it's still way too early for the full version. Let's do baby steps. Don't *hate* the sinner. Don't *dehumanize* the sinner. Even if it makes you feel real good to do so.

---

"The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats."

- Aldous Huxley (in "Crome Yellow")

"Dark-Ego-Vehicle Principle: Social justice activism is widely regarded as driven by noble intentions, but it attracts large numbers of psychopaths, narcissists, and other dark tetrad personalities who use it to feed their sense of self-importance and to dominate others."

- Gurwinder

See also: "The Evil Glee of Sanctimonious Scorn"

Scalesfall, USA

The hard right, which spent decades screaming and hollering about pedophilia, is largely cool with pardoning arguably the biggest monster of the biggest child sex trafficking ring in modern history.

The hard left, which spent decades screaming and hollering about rape, is largely cool with Hamas raping Jewish Israeli women.

Everyone's just posing. Signifying. Waving flags and feeling righteous in their mouthy stand. Peel back the skin, and it's brute tribalism. Hatred for the Other is the only real thing. The sole motivator.

Performative virtue, as the fruit of a poisoned tree, cannot help but be hypocritical and spotty.


It doesn't fit my thesis, but I can't resist: Priests spent centuries preaching hellfire for teenagers depraved enough to commit the sin of masturbation, yet have been buggering kiddies in droves. Perhaps a relatively small minority, but the majority has been largely cool with it.

The Most Delicious Cocktails

Here's why I'm wrong for this world. Someone I know announced to friends on social media that he plans to open a great cocktail bar with absolutely the most delicious cocktails. His friends were supportive. What a great idea. Hey, who doesn't love great cocktails?

A few months later, he posted photos of himself taking a class in mixology at a bartending school. The response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Can't wait to try your great cocktails! Shortly thereafter, he opened his bar. A labor of love!

Molar-grinding though it is, this, in and of itself, is not why I'm wrong for this world. This is just why the world is wrong for me.

The killer is that the top two paragraphs will be completely opaque for 99% of readers. "What exactly is your problem with this, Jim?"

I'm a slob who wants a genuinely delicious cocktail, not the proposition of one (see the "Face-In-Hole Board" section here). Is that so crazy?


Also, I'd like to live in a world with genuineness, broadly. Where we sip and are moved to go "Mmm!", and not just grimly peck out "YUM!" on Instagram.

The Shivering Fisherman

I was newly introduced to someone who immediately wanted to discuss how awful Donald Trump is. So corrupt and shameless! Such a racist liar! Isn't he just awful?

I replied, with unconcealable exasperation, that this guy's been front and center for a solid decade, so those conclusions are pretty solid by now for those who share them. Little value could be wrung from the hundred trillionth iteration of the lament.

But I realized I'd just called him boring. And while it was true—he was being flabbergastingly boring—that wasn't the reason for my exasperation. So I reached for a metaphor.

"You're like an ice fisherman who cuts a hole in the ice, baits and sinks his line, and, awaiting a nibble, exclaims, "Jesus, it's cold!"

He stared at me blankly.

"An ice fisherman who's been at it for more than a week should have found some way to come to terms with cold. Dress for it, stoically bear it, or retrain yourself to feel eager for it. Someone who ice fishes on a frozen lake for years, complaining about the cold the whole time, is the definition of a crazy person. And while we're all free to choose our own approaches, in this case I've shown up, dropped my line, and settled in for a neighborly fishing session, and you lead with 'Is it just me, or is it cold?' Of course it's cold! We're ice fishing!!"

He squinted. "So you're telling me not to complain?"

"No. I'm suggesting you not complain in exactly the same way over the exact same situation for ten years straight. And if you can't help yourself, don't inflict it on your fellow fishermen, who've put effort into adapting to the cold. Nothing's gained by focusing on the frigidity of a frozen lake. Acceptance precedes sanity!"

"I will never accept the presidency of Donald Trump," he replied tightly, his posture stiffening in a show of staunch resistance.

And I flashed on my posting last week, which explained how accepting loss or disappointment doesn't require approval. I.e. don't expect to reach a point of approval re: the death of your hamster! Little Freddie's death will never stoke joy!

The acceptance/approval confusion seems more widely prevalent than I'd realized. We're all locked in obsession with our remaining sub-optimalities here in Utopia. Princesses, increasingly vexed by smaller and smaller mattress peas, refuse to accept perturbation because they can't, by definition, approve of it. So anything disliked is forever unacceptable. Like this unacceptably cold frozen lake!

If we'd stop requiring approval in order to accept, we might actually enjoy the ice fishing—or a rewarding conversation with a new acquaintance. The stuck record might finally play forward!

This person spent ten years perpetually renewing his shock at Donald Trump's awfulness because he cannot accept something he disapproves of lingering on his dashboard.

Anything un-approvable is unacceptable!

That's the underlying mechanism accounting for all the sour, toxic stuck-ness we all sense in contemporary society (not just politics). Anything un-approvable is unacceptable, and must be re-hashed, re-processed, and relived in an unremitting loop until it’s just the way we like it.