The Prosperity Ratchet

A luxury soon becomes a necessity.

Example number twelve zillion: I just drove five minutes to the Guatemalan deli for soup. Halfway there, I realized I'd gone out without my preciousssssssss. No iPhone. Well, no biggie. It's just soup! Back in a minute!

The deli was playing the coolest Mexican banda I'd ever heard (I'm a superfan of the genre). And the Guatemalans - who know nothing about Mexico, and for whom the source of the omnipresent music is as mysterious as water or electricity - couldn't help me.

My hand kept reaching into my empty pocket, but the band would remain forever unknown to me. This shocks me, as a modern human entitled to know stuff. I couldn't even jot down a to-do note to try to figure it out!

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And there you have it. The central (and almost entirely unrecognized) dilemma of our era. A luxury soon becomes a necessity.

Here we all are, ensconced in unimaginable safety, comfort and freedom, enjoying such vast discretionary wealth that among our gravest problems - even among our "poor" - are the overabundance of food and of personal possessions. Yet we sulk and complain far more than our forebears.

Those ancestors worked and sacrificed to elevate us to this position of heady delight, but the joke's on them: we fuckin hate it. Because the more delightful it gets, the more delight we feel entitled to, and the more irritated we are by petty irritations. We are princesses constantly scanning for smaller and smaller mattress peas.

After 300,000 years, home sapiens has hacked the reward/punishment system, but, as the driving force for all biological life, that process never stops. We wearily accept the heady rewards, which have come to feel like entitlement ("a luxury soon becomes a necessity"), but, in the absence of any real punishment, we fabricate it.

We fabricate grievance and victimhood, even while we wryly recognize “rich people problems,” hahaha. We pour ourselves into sad songs and stories, violent films and video games, and endless rumination over the failure of a given perfect moment to be perfect in every parameter we can dream up.

A friend recently threw a perfect party for the perfect marriage of her perfect daughter, but all she could do was tearfully weep over HOW AWFUL IT WAS THAT HER FATHER COULDN'T SEE IT. I pointed out that this same line could be used to ruin absolutely any delightful moment (remember how we all ballast our happiness?). "I love the cherry pie...but HOW AWFUL THAT MY FATHER CAN'T TASTE IT!"

My observation did nothing to lighten her load; her entitled grievance; her weighty self-encumbrance. Yes, she nodded solemnly, it's true. This imperfection - this unimaginably tragic rupture in her unsullied perfection - has ruined positively everything.

All-purpose self-punishment for the gal who has it all!


If you think I'm A MONSTER because GRIEVING IS HARD and the flamboyantly aggrieved deserve special treatment and solicitous soothing, read this and then read this.

Reward and Punishment

Reward and punishment propel all biological behavior, including human. While deeply locked into that binary system, humans harbor a speck of awareness that they're being manipulated. It stresses us and makes us neurotic. Something seems off!

A lab mouse feels victorious pushing the red button to be fed a treat while diligently avoiding the punishing blue button. No stress there! He’s a real winner! And he'll keep pressing that button over and over until the end of his days. But humans are (just barely) intelligent enough to foggily recognize the game.

Here's the edge of recognition of that dawning truth; the dangling thread to be pulled:

The reward is always chintzy (which explains why humans are "never satisfied") and the punishment is always oversold (which is why the worrying is always worse than the actuality).

It's a pretty crappy game. The cynic's bitter assessment of a shitty world is not senseless. But if you forswear enchantment with the laboratory apparatus - the cheap lures and petty repellants - and simply embrace it all as-is (a unity rather than a binary), that shift of perspective reveals a world that's extraordinarily non-crappy.

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To clarify, the crappiness doesn't, like, vanish. It's revealed as part of a greater beauty. Everything in its place! All hues contributing to a full, rich, enticing color spectrum! Exasperation fades and is replaced by fascination with the soulfully intriguing wrinkles within an infinitely captivating tapestry.

We claim to desire a world that's nothing but the "positive" stuff, but such a world would swiftly drive us mad. In fact, that's precisely what's happening right now. As I once wrote,

After millennia spent desperately seeking cheat codes for this world, figuring the whole while that things would be so much better if only we could purge the illness and lions and warlords, the famines, droughts, and extreme poverty, we've done it! This richest of rich-world countries has expunged the vast majority of its nemeses! Yet look around you. Most of us spend most of our time building needless drama, stress, and sorrow for ourselves. We are far more depressed than any human beings anywhere, ever. We build internal towers of brooding discontent, and spend vast tracts of time lost in tumultuous TV shows and video games and sad songs and memories of pain and worries of loss, desperately seeking out whatever snatches of drama we can find to identify with.

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Further reading:

A Tale of Two Chickens
Exiting the Skinner Box
Why God Lets Bad Things Happen
Paradise Lost
The Stories We Tell Ourselves
The Evolution of a Perspective

Exiting the Skinner Box

Longtime readers know I own a slew of shares of SIGA. Their drug is the only viable cure for smallpox and other pox viruses such as monkeypox. Amid the monkeypox outbreak a few months ago, SIGA went from $7 to $26. Some short-term benchmarks lay ahead, so I held on, but monkeypox fizzled (yay, world!), and it's back to $9. Whoops!

For a few weeks, I was, on paper, a whole other person. And I felt it! I didn't walk around with a big sack of footballs, spiking them periodically while screaming a deep, throaty "YESSSSS!" Nothing so crazy. But I did project a certain confidence. My mood was markedly different.

At the same time, I lost 20 pounds, and projected a certain confidence as a Thin Person. The weight loss had happened rather suddenly, and I was still more or less fitting the same-sized clothes. But the scale doesn't lie! My mood was markedly different.

The scale, however, lied. Long story, but I didn't actually lose that weight. Just the 8 pounds previously lost (before re-gaining a couple in Pennsylvania Dutch Country). So, yeah, I'm pudgy again. Though nothing really changed, either way.

Nothing really changed. Not in either story. Nothing real improved or declined. Some abstract numbers reconfigured - a couple of meters reported differently - that's all, yet this entirely transformed my mood and confidence. Which means I still haven't fully learned!

I haven't fully absorbed the Holiday Blues story lesson, that what's happening right here and now (if I "come back to my senses" rather than indulging mental abstraction and story-telling) is the only reality...and right here and now is always pretty delightful (unless you think about it). For example, a bubble of life-giving oxygen somehow follows me everywhere, to the point where I actually take it for granted, even though I'm dangerously vulnerable to the briefest pause in supply.

I haven't fully lost my attraction to Skinner Boxes. Those are the familiar lab devices that train mice - via reward - to press one button and - via punishmnent - to not press the other (the same process which, if you pay attention, propels virtually all human behavior). This despite my having declared independence from their feeble machinations. I wrote earlier this year that...

I entirely eschew Skinner Boxes. I don't grab at trinkets. I don't seek wins or validation or kudos. I've been through all that, experiencing both profusion and scarcity, and am no longer opted-in to the process.

Hey, there's realizing and there's realizing. There's rejecting and there's rejecting. But now that I've framed framing, I undestand better. Realizing and rejecting are framings, and framings are dynamic. We constantly reframe, and that's a feature, not a bug, because a frozen perspective is hell.

If you shift to a perspective of full cognizance - the "full framing", completely dilated without resistence or constriction - and somehow made yourself freeze there, you'd be prey to all the maladies of frozen perspective - depression chief among them - even though everything seems incomparably lovely and problems strike you as soulful and intriguing wrinkles in an infinitely captivating tapestry.

At some point captivation recaptivates. Hmm, what an interesting tapestry! And back into the drama we dive, resuming the continuity of our inner storytelling and placing our chips on the table to savor the delicious stress of stakedness as we chase the nominally good outcome and evade the nominally bad one. A few dollars gained (on paper) or a few pounds lost (on a malfunctioning scale's readout) feel like WINNING, despite the hilariously disconnected flimsiness of it all. As I wrote here,

If you pay close attention, you'll notice the reward is always chintzy (which explains - I've buried the lede - why humans are "never satisfied") and the punishment is always oversold (which is why the worrying is always worse than the actuality).

The chicken, trained to endlessly hit the red button which rewards with a corn pellet (and not the red one which punishes via mild shock), thinks it's just killin' it.

Picture Tube Problems

I'm re-watching the last few episodes of Avenue 5 ahead of tonight's second season debut, and it's only reinforcing my creepy first impression.

This is a sci-fi spoof by the great Armando Iannucci, who created Veep and In the Loop and The Thick of It, classics all. It's dense with high quality humor product. Clusters of multi-spectrum jokes - fresh topical jokes and slightly cornier old-school jokes and snarky millennial jokes and...you get the idea. And it's got great actors like Hugh Laurie and Zach Woods (also, alas, irritating Josh Gad, which might be part of the problem).

So why "creepy" and "problem"? I can't quite tell you. The show just doesn't click at a fundamental level. The best diagnosis I can offer is that it takes a 1970s sitcom view of its erstwhile reality - you expect Dean Martin to show up as a boozy guest on the show's spacefaring cruiseship, making winking in-jokes about how "wild" all the science is - and layers it with anachronistically modernist humor. Modernism maybe demands real characters in real situations (ala Veep), not just joke-expelling mouthpieces in front of jokey backdrops. But that's a murky assessment. It doesn't explain how the show got so skewed.

There's some tectonic factor at work just beyond the viewer's, uh, view. A network suit made a giant clumsy demand which the show strains to work around. Or Iannucci is unhappily pandering, or otherwise forcing a result that doesn't jibe with his talents. Or scripts have been re-doctored to the point where there's no meat left, just clever decoration. Some Foundational Problem we can't reverse engineer from this side of the screen.

Unseen tectonic fuckery (UTF) crops up from time to time in any realm. And I have a name for it: a "Picture Tube Problem".

In the early 1970s, when my family got its first color TV, something was unsettlingly wrong with the picture, but we couldn't quite pin it down. Certain colors were over-emphasized, others under-emphasized. It was just nebulously off in some serious way. The repairman came, and explained that the TV produces its spectrum of colors from three basic hues: red, blue, and green. And we'd lost blue. That's all.

The cause was simple, even though the problem seemed vexingly murky/slippery. A clear-cut problem if you knew....or an unsettling miasma of wrongness if you didn't.

A "Picture Tube Problem"!

Taxonomy of Nightmares

Facebook friend asks:

I had a horrible dream where no matter what, I could not remember anything. Where I parked my car, what kind of car I had, etc. I was in the parking garage all stressed out. It was horrible!

My reply:

These are the three most common stress nightmares:

1. Oppressive obstruction or impedance (most common: “I need to run but my legs won’t move”).

2. Forgot a step (anything from needing to return to high school for one last test to going outside naked to realizing you're unprepared for something important).

3. Find yourself somewhere high and can’t get back down.

There’s another sort, not caused by stress, which (unlike the above) we normally forget upon waking: “This world makes no sense.”

This happens when you lose some of the suspension of disbelief necessary to accept dream illogic. It's a dark version of lucid dreaming, where you realize you’re dreaming and have fun with it, flying around, etc. You've applied some critical dispassion to recognize that the realm you're in - nonlinear and unreal - makes little sense, but you're too foggy to frame it as "dreaming", so you get stuck stressfully struggling to force it to make sense (spoiler: our waking world offers the same conundrum...which benefits from the same solution: critical dispassion and blithe embrace, while framing it for what it actually is: a story you're telling yourself).

What you describe sounds like a combination of “forgot a step” and anxious partial lucid dreaming, per above.

Suggestion: practice lucid dreaming techniques (google is your friend) to bridge the impasse if it repeats. And practice meditation to relieve anxiety as well as to boost your lucid dreaming effort (this is the simple, stripped-down, non-dogmatic, non-religious, non-joiny and extremely efficacious meditation practice I do, but I strongly suggest skipping the rest of the web site).

Another asks:

I've had this one for years: Trying to get ready to be someplace and obstacle after obstacle keeps popping up - can't find the other shoe, stuck in traffic, walking through thick mud that slows my pace . . . .

Obstruction and impedance. The first on my list, above


Further reading: Counterintuitive note on dreaming in "All A Game"

Nightmare note in "Inoculation (or: I’ve Figured Out Cats!)"

Matching Social Ante

Imagine someone aloof, selfish, petty, and peevish, who always carefully observes the social graces. "Good morning" and "Excuse me". And not just "Thank you", but “Thank you very much.” Woah.
He’d never just blurt a text message. There’s always a formal greeting. “Good morning! I sincerely hope you’re well! If I may, regarding the hedge clippers....”

In his mind, he's paid his social ante. No asshole he! He does the things! The goodness things! He's ticked the boxes, so what more could we ask of him?

Christians are saved by declaring belief in Jesus. Others are saved by courteous statements of greeting. Incantations are not a relic of the past! We still have magic words!

Of course, none of us benefit much from such courtesies. In fact, it's cumbersome to wait out the performative box-ticking by people absolving their general dickishness via empty formality. But, of course, none of it is for us. It’s all just preening into mirrors (we don’t recognize this because we’re way too narcissistic to grasp how narcissistic everyone is).

But here's the interesting part. We are compelled to mirror that box-ticking! If you were to informally blurt via text message to a formal text messager, that would place you beyond the pale (it's perfectly logical, given that text message formality is the thing keeping that person within the pale!)

Deft sociality compels us to 1. determine a person's social ante and 2. diligently match it, per normal gaming ante convention.

If Martin Shkreli makes careful eye contact while hand-shaking, you'd best consistently do likewise, or he'll think you a monster. And Vladimir Putin, who annexes peaceful neighbors and once brought an immense dog into a negotiation with canine-phobic Angela Merkel, prides himself on flawless conversational politeness. A class act! If you don't match it, that would make you an absolute barbarian even if you boast a near-perfect record of not slaughtering innocent civilians and stuffing their bodies into mass graves or impoverishing your own nation by stealing more wealth than you could ever imaginably hope to use.

Great 20 Minute Catch-Up on Putin's Nuclear Threat

Bring yourself solidly up to date on current analysis of Putin's nuclear threats via recent thoughts from two of the experts most qualified to opine...in under 20 minutes.

Tom Nichols has long been a top authority on nuclear strategy, specifically with regard to Russia. Read his thoughts, intelligent and insightful as ever, in this short essay for The Atlantic (written yesterday). He's worried but not super-worried.

Alexander Vindman lacks Nichols' decades of speciality in nuclear issues, but knows more about Putin and the Ukraine conflict. He deems nuclear deployment even less likely. Listen to this podcast interview, recorded Thursday, here (the nuclear topic starts 17 minutes and 50 seconds in).

Listening to both is edifying. Lots of stuff you likely had never considered. They're also soothing, as neither seems particularly alarmed.

Inoculation (or: I’ve Figured Out Cats!)

Our taste buds are designed to benevolently guide us to palatable food, and away from foods that harm us.

Yes, they do entice us toward sugar and fat. But that's because calories - jesus, any calories at all! - were helpful once, back when we were starving cavemen in grasslands. Less so now while sedentary in offices, but they haven't caught up. Our taste biology is due for an upgrade rendering potato chips unpalatable (I just legit micro-panicked).

Bitterness, for example, signals foods toxic to humans. So why do we enjoy bitter stuff like IPA, dark chocolate, and gin-and-tonics?

It's because a harmless dose of The Bad Thing soothes. It provides psychological inoculation against deep-seated fears, such as death from poisoning. We enjoy nothing more than a deliciously safe taste of death. In fact, the French use the term La Petite Mort ("the little death") in reference to orgasm. Heart-stopping ecstasy is a terrific thing. Hearts actually stopping, not so much. It’s, once again, the magic of low density.

Adventure activities such as rock climbing, snowboarding, or moderating online forums inoculate us, psychologically, against mortality. They're most often explained in terms of ego and victory, though. One "triumphs in tempting death!" But while that's a nice clear image, I don't think it's the best explanation. The truth is more subtle. Again: we inoculate against mortality.

This explains why so many mountain climbers are counter-phobics, having started out with profound fear of heights. I love the concept of counter-phobia. You can fight an engrained phobia so far that you go all the way the other way. It's an easy mistake to make, as it's incredibly hard to detect an arrival point - a reasonable midpoint - while fighting tenaciously into a fierce headwind. So counter-acrophobics support their runwaway process via frequent inoculation. More mountains! More sheer cliffs! More granite!

Saunas and steam baths inoculate against oppressive heat

Comedy inoculates against catastrophe.

Intense competitive sports (as participant or spectator) inoculate against warfare.

Teddy bears are a cute, soft, soothing taste of the scariest possible danger. It's no wonder we have kids sleep with them (me, I sleep next to a crocodile, and, in nightmares, crocodiles never attack me, they rescue me). A harmless dose of The Bad Thing is remarkably soothing.

This brings us to cats. Do I even need to say it? Just look at them! They're a stunted, somewhat-not-really harmless representation of evil. Like teddy bears, they're cute and soft and fluffy. But grownups require more bracing inoculation. A higher tiny dose.

Cats are homeopathic treatment for full-out evil. A hair of the dog that bit you. They inoculate us from the very thing they represent.

We keep cats like primitives keep the shrunken heads of their enemies.

There's Nothing Staler Than Yesterday's Future

There's nothing more corny than a previous era's mind-blowing modernism.

A can of Campbell's soup on a fine art canvas in a fancy gallery is now the opposite of provocative. It's far more corny than a still life or nighttime cityscape - forms that have drearily existed for centuries.

Same for a sax player honking atonally, freed from the chains of tempo and harmony. After four notes, everyone consciously or unconsciously says "Ok, that." A shtick. Again, the opposite of mind-blowing. The very epitome of corniness.

Conservative painters who keep doing figurative work, respecting traditional confines of frame and the whole brush/paint/canvas rigmarole, might present subtle originality which might be parsable generations hence. But while the modernist gambit of smashing form seems rawly provocative in the moment, it never holds up. The last thing modernists want is to ever seem stale, but that's the inevitable fate of form-smashing gestures. After the fourth or fifth iteration, it becomes "Ok, that." A shtick.

There's nothing staler than yesterday's avant-garde.

I hope I haven't made that seem too reasonable, because it's actually a pretty fresh and counterintuitive observation. Though it may not seem so in the future, if this view ever becomes more widely accepted. If so, it will seem dully obvious. Radical freshness of any sort - not just avant garde art - always carries an expiration date.

There's nothing more passé than yesterday's future. Flintstones reruns still leave 'em laughing while The Jetsons now seem archaic (even though we still don't have flying cars). And nothing screams "The Old Days" more than boldly futuristic automotive tail fins, much as I love them.

I've mentioned this before, but in the mid 1990s I commandeered a forum on the pre-web dial-in service Compuserve, and made it "Jim Leff Forum" (after a brief warm-up, months earlier, concocting a "Garlic Forum"). At the time, a personal online presence was like a slot on cable TV. There were no personal home pages. Compuserve wasn't about elevating Sally-Robinson-who-you-went-to-high-school-with. Compuserve was about elevating Hewlett Packard and USA Today and Roger Ebert. It was a shiny, big-money thing.

I acquired the keys to an abandoned forum, turned the lights back on, and tricked it out to make it discordantly personal - the zone of one guy and his pals - and it felt heady and startling enough that people absolutely freaked out (the prank was recounted in a book a few years later).

I can't explain it to anyone today, however. It sounds like the most nothing of nothings. The internet IS Sally-Robinson-who-you-went-to-high-school-with! So while milder, more incremental schemes of mine have stood up over time, my most creative exploit has zero impact in retrospect. It's laughably banal. There's nothing more passé than yesterday's future!

Relative Mass

195 lbs:
"How do you stay so thin as a food writer?!?"


205 lbs:
"How do you stay so thin as a food writer?"


215 lbs:
"You're pretty thin for a food writer!"


220lbs:
"How do you manage your weight as a food writer?"


225 lbs:
"I was expecting you to be really fat!"