Power

My father—like a lot of fathers until about twenty five years ago, when most chose to be their kids' empowering, enabling, and emotionally uplifting best friends, averse to tarnishing their own lofty self image via unpleasant friction from hardened stances, irrespective of the entitled, deluded little humans they inflicted upon the world—was a bit of a tyrant.

Nothing awful. But he leaned into it sometimes. When a certain type of person notices power in a relationship, it's sugar to be devoured rather than medicine to be rationed with mature prudence. A house full of kids reliant for food and shelter seem like a captive audience; an experimental laboratory; a flattering array of shiny mirrors.

It was mostly tolerable. He was not a bad man, so he made real effort to constrain his considerable fury. And, per above, "yes, and..." might be a great way to do improv comedy but it's no way to raise kids. But he could get a tad drunk on petty power, and I found it scary to have no means of constraining him. An eleven year old may be immature, but he's not larval. He's a person. And those who bear power should bear in mind that personhood under unchecked authority is a harrowing experience.

I sensed that there might be a magical sentence I could break out under particular duress, but couldn't quite articulate it. It seemed to radiate toward me, amid much static, from my elder self as a message in a bottle (not surprising, because I was at the same time sending messages forward to that same elder self, many of which I've cataloged here). It was tantalizingly close at hand, but I couldn't make out the words.

In one's 60s, one re-processes one's childhood issues and confusions. And, as I do so, I find myself imagining saying this to my father:

Our roles will flip. You will decline, and may require my help and support. The dependency curve will reverse. You imagine you have unchecked authority, but your actions have consequences. Never forget that the tables will turn, and that I will remember.

Because I can be slow and foggy, it took a few years for me to realize that my occasional repetition of this polished spell was like a radio beacon broadcasting who-knows-where in time and space.


Anyone feeling powerless might take heart from that same broadcast. Tables turn. Dependencies flip. Your day will come.

Worship

A guy I know came to me for expert help. As I explained things to him, he kept interrupting. He argued, detoured, and frequently interjected that he KNEW THAT—even when he obviously didn't. He tried incessantly to seize control of the process of being helped. "I've got this!" was his message, even though he'd come to me for guidance.

This seemed counterproductive but not unfamiliar. This is why adults are notoriously unable to learn. They'd rather remain ignorant, feeling like they know stuff, than concede deficiency and accept knowledge.

But this isn't about learning.

To me, it doesn't seem like a major "ask" to insist that people seeking help calm down and take a note without injecting fountains of sputtering chaos. But I forget how tenaciously people cling to the pose of "I've got this". They don't even realize they're posing. Their daft sense of assurance feels soldered to their circuit boards—inseparable from their sense of self. Remove this assurance and there'd be little left. At most, a jiggling, wriggling, vulnerable mass of larvae.

To shut up for a moment and take in information—without feeling wrecked by the power imbalance or humiliated by the self-suspension—would feel like self-evisceration. Asking someone to drop the act and suspend the bluster is like asking them to prostrate and adoringly kiss your feet. You are demanding, essentially, worship.


It always puzzled me that saints and gurus and gods and even Jehovah himself would be so haughty and demanding. How odd that they'd want tribute paid, prostration performed, and fealty sworn, as if to some Pashtun warlord. It hardly seems divine! Why would God and His facilitators require worship?

They don't! But the requirement to drop posing and open up feels debasing. And to cultivate sincerity feels denuding. That's what people mean when they talk about worship.

The Whole World Eats Fufu

Fufu is the only truly pan-African dish. If you ask some bitter African emigres I know, it's the only African dish, period.

Fitting for humanity's mother continent, fufu is grounded, earthy, and rooty. Literally! You pound yams or other tubers (sometimes maize) until they utterly give up, texturally, and are transformed into a jiggling blob of starchy ectoplasm. Tear off a wisp, dunk it into the "soup" (the broad term for whatever's not fufu), and eat. If you're living large, you might have been served morsels of protein to grab up, as well.

It's all performed with thumb and first two fingers, so it's messy work—though Congolese serve a dainty little bowl of water—but kind of fun. Kind of different. And while Japanese won't blink twice at your chopstick prowess, nor can you ever hope to impress an Italian with your spaghetti wrangling, white people deftly consuming fufu can draw an entire village of awed spectators.

So you need to be careful not to mess up. A fine point distinguishes natives from tourists: you must never chew fufu. Chewing fufu is as pointless as chewing water. It marks you as a clown. Just let the fufu glide down your throat, suppressing any chewing urge. Because there's nothing to chew.

Fufu has been part of my life since the 1980s. At this point, it's as familiar as reaching for my nutcracker in a Maryland crab house or scooping Lebanese mezza with pita bits. It's a familiar groove, though a whole other thing. But it's hard to explain to people, because it seems strange and foreign.

I was feeling disoriented eating the meal in the above photo because it was half finger-food (fufu + beany soup) and half fork/knife food (roast fish, plantains, tomato/onion salad). I felt an impulse to just dump the soup over the mound of (corn) fufu and work it with my fork. Sort of like mashed potatoes. Suddenly I realized, in a flash: holy crap, MASHED POTATOES ARE FUFU.

I called over the chef, a Senegalese Brazilian living in Portugal, and shared my epiphany.

"You know mashed potatoes, like the French eat?"

"Yeah, sure."

"It's fufu!"

"What do you mean, 'it's fufu'?" she frowned.

"IT'S FUFU! It's totally fufu!" I enthused. And her eyes began to spark.

"The whole world eats fufu!" I whispered.

Shaken, she nodded gravely in agreement and staggered back to the kitchen, lost in thought.

Media Tip

I'll offer you a critical bit of media coaching that's little-understood because no one ever spells it out: When you're asked an interview question (particularly on "live" media, e.g. radio, podcast, streaming, etc.), do not sweat your accuracy.

Unless you're important. Which you're not, even though you feel super important because someone with a microphone is asking you questions. Uh-uh. You're not important, nobody cares, and nothing you're saying matters. Be very clear about that.

As you consume media, I've just killed you a little (sorry/not sorry) by making you aware of an annoyance that hadn't previously annoyed you. It's everywhere.

Here's an example:

"So, Vincent, when did you first start playing the cello?"

"Ah, let's see. It was the early 80s. I want to say......1981? 1982? No, wait. Actually, it wasn't until 1983. September 1983, when I began seventh grade."

No one cares, Vincent. Those 20 seconds served no one. Not you, not your interviewer, not the audience. This isn't, like, a deposition.

Understand the proposition. For an interviewer, you are (hopefully) lively airtime fodder. For the audience, entertainment. For yourself, marketing and influencing. But you've just failed at all those things.

If you're genuinely important, by all means, take pains to get every bit of it right.

"Condoleezza, how many days notice did we give our Saudi allies prior to the Iraqi invasion?"

Ms. Rice should do what's necessary to cough up a correct answer, because it's a genuine matter of historical record. Vincent's stupid cello, not so much.

I'm not quite saying it's ok to lie and skate through interview questions—though if you did, no one would notice and it wouldn't matter. My point is that you're just pretending to answer questions. You are a dancing monkey, so invest all effort in presentation. It is incumbent on you to understand your role. This is not a police interview where someone's filling out a report with your replies. You are there to inject style, pacing, and delivery.

I never lost track of this in any interview—live, print, or otherwise. It was my magic trick, making me a sought-after interview subject and go-to for blurby quotes. It wasn't just my wit, it was my understooding of the basis. I went through the motions of answering questions while concentrating on giving the interviewer lively fodder, audiences provocative entertainment, and myself message amplification.

Roused from numb zombie mode, you will now constantly notice the problem everywhere, and groan whenever an interviewee imagines you giving a fraction of a fuck about when he started cello lessons, or where she met her ice ballet partner, or how old they were when they realized bagel holes could be filled with stuff.

We'd Rather Suffer than Suffer

I've got a thing with my ankle. The ligament is overstretched from too many sprains over the years. So as I walk, the ligament may unpredictably slip out of place and, BAM, I essentially have a sprained ankle. Amid a nice stroll, or while hurrying to an appointment, walking suddenly becomes impossible, passersby assume the poor man has Tourette's, and I need to figure out how the hell to get home.

I've avoided surgery, managing via physical therapy plus a bag of tricks for resetting the ligament on the fly. It's shakily under control. But this is not a posting about ankles. It's about framing. About perspective. About attitude.

This morning, as I took a walk, I suddenly realized that I've enjoyed several days of uninterrupted, easy, pain-free walking. And I felt a shower of gratitude, tinged with irony over how easily we forget to proclaim small victories. It's comically hard to celebrate what passes for normality.

A dissenting voice piped up in my thought stream. "Don't say that! You're inviting problems!"

This, for your information, was the voice of my Jewish ancestors (after all the pork, I'm amazed they're still speaking to me), delivering a core tenet of Judaism. Nearly everything you'd imagine fundamental to Jewish life—bagels, beards, black hats—evolved 55 or 60 centuries into the timeline, but this trope goes back practically the whole way: Don't clock your luck! Don't note your success! Don't proclaim happiness or victory because you're only inviting problems!

And it's unimaginably stupid and counterproductive. I struggle to understand how it's lasted all these centuries. The upshot—and I'm Mr. Upshot— is that when it's bad, you suffer. And when it's good, you suffer. All this to avoid suffering. Suffering's so bad that we'd rather suffer than suffer.

As I strode along on a lovely late-summer day, my ankles didn't hurt a bit. I was completely free to walk for miles. Delicious liberation. And if my very next step were to bring agony, so what? I'd try to readjust the ligament, perhaps devising a new move to add to my repertoire. And I'd take a taxi home if necessary. The fate my ancestors would have me avoid at all costs is a mere stumble, while the capacity to walk is a small miracle fit for celebration.


The idea behind ‘Don’t clock your luck/Don’t note your success/Don’t proclaim happiness or victory’ may have started out more karma-yoga-ish before it calcified into small-minded superstition. Do what you do full-heartedly, without wasting effort on credit or status.

More on karma yoga here, or via postings with that tag.

Uncommon Terseness

I'm replaying this posting from April, 2014.


A Slog reader who prefers to remain anonymous was kind enough to share her favorite pull-quotes from past postings. I honestly can't recall writing more than half of these (I remember more clearly the labored overlong ones!):

Most singers become singers because they want to be singers, not because they want to sing. That's why most singers are so awful. (link)

Admiring and supporting unheralded greatness is what the universe wants us to do. The angels swoon when we discover their hidden treasure - their fiendishly clever and luminously beautiful Easter eggs. (link)

We over-emphasize first-movers, crediting them with creating waves when, truly, they're just surfing them like everyone else. Causality has nothing to do with it. The first popping kernel doesn't make the other kernels pop. (link)

I wouldn't want to return to 1973. We went too far. You could feel society slogging and smell the rot (and pay a tax rate north of 90%). 1973 could have made a Tea Party partisan out of any but the most fervid of current liberals. (link)

When people are determined to misunderstand, misunderstanding's unavoidable. Per Maslow's hammer, if all you have is snark, everyone looks like an asshole. (link)

Billions of people yearn for greatness. Millions of people do things they hope will make them great. Thousands of people do great things with nary a thought about where it will leave them. (link)

Richard Scarry was right: it takes all kinds, and by contributing our respective expertise, we create a utopian whole (which liberals romanticize as cooperation and which conservatives theorize as competition - a false dichotomy that was the "original sin" of political theory). (link)

The opposite of being a discriminated-against minority isn't becoming an empowered minority, it's pluralism. Boring old pluralism. The reason gay rights have transformed with such miraculous speed is that this is exactly the tack they took. "We just want to love who we love, like any American." Not 'a gay thing', just an American thing. The message was delivered by boring, well-dressed, reasonable people, not dudes defiantly flaunting their nipple clamps. (link)

Why on earth would I want a female presidency, or a Jewish presidency? Administrations aren't like novelty flavors of KitKat bars. I don't want some glorious rainbow, I want smart governance. (link)

I've never met anyone who's consistently lived with integrity and who regrets it. (link)

The miracle of human beings is that we're finite - i.e. limited - in every respect, yet we're capable of infinite love, infinite creativity, infinite joy, and infinite wisdom within those limitations. (link)

The really good stuff arrives via epiphany, eureka, and inspiration - "out of nowhere" and hard to claim credit for. (link)

I never understood how anyone could experience transcendent greatness and not want to devote their lives to it. (link)

If you love transcendence, you've got to cherish the obstacles which spur it; the necessity which mothers the invention. (link)

Anxiety is the bain of deep-carers. (link)

The care, the love, the discipline and thoughtfulness we invest in our most prosaic actions changes absolutely everything. That's how the future is perpetually created. (link)

If you simply sweat the small stuff, sans self-consciousness or aspiration (just "because!"), angels will sing. (link)

While the present day feels like a new corporate era - one where a CFO might play bass in a punk band and vote Democrat, and the encubicled set deems themselves cool and creative - make no mistake about it: corporate attitude remains 1956ishly square. Deep-down, these guys are all still crewcuts-and-tie-clips. (link)

Just because people keep proposing really bad solutions doesn't mean there isn't a problem! (link)

Quality oughtn't be a side effect. (link)

You have no idea how disorienting it is to spend your life plying an art form that's so extraordinarily marginalized - even ridiculed - when that same art form is the unanimous commercial choice for setting a tone of hip urbanity. (link)

Racism, sexism, classism, etc. are nothing more than the incomplete registration of a perfectly appropriate misanthropy. (link)

As a member of five or six minority groups, myself, I find myself cringing whenever I see groups to which I belong depicted or discussed with anxious care and glossy patina. What awful thing, after all, are they so carefully dancing around?!?"(link)

If you've got a zit on the tip of your nose, all injustice appears to stem from that. (link)

I no longer plug mishaps into my narrative of woe. And without that, it's all just stuff happening. (link)

Qualities such as kindness, intelligence, generosity, and a sense of humor are of service to others. Beauty, by contrast, serves only its possessor. (link)

I like to be told that I'm being an idiot. This helps me be less of an idiot. By contrast, most people recoil quite strongly from acknowledging to themselves any idiocy in their thought or behavior. They'd much rather be idiots than feel like idiots. (link)

Nationalism is always a noble-seeming mask for xenophobia. Show me someone who loves "Us", and I'll show you someone who hates "Them". (link)

History always unfolds via a succession of immoderately reactive pendulum swings. Will we human beings ever learn to react to extremism with enlightened moderation rather than with reciprocal extremism? (link and another)

Scientists say it's very difficult to learn new skills after one's mid-twenties. I think they're slicing that wrong. What happens is that it becomes very difficult to imagine (and to tolerate) change as one's self-image solidifies. And learning is change. (link)

America is so rich that we mistake mere discomfort for bona fide poverty. (link)

Anyone in the first world yearning to get rich is really just dreaming of getting richer. (link)

Better to be a hapless shmuck who occasionally surprises than to be a hero who inevitably disappoints. (link)

Hell is a place human beings voluntarily condemn themselves to. (link)

The real secret is not to learn to get what you want. It's to learn to want what you get. link

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.