lowercase-m meaning

There are a lot of people who work at my company. We all have different reasons for working there. Some of us want to provide for our families, some of us want to feel like we are contributing, some of us want pride, some of us just want enough financial freedom to afford nights and weekends, etc. These different goals do not prevent us from looking across all workers’ reasons and trying to come up with some Ultimate Reason for working there, but you could only do it in the vaguest and most half-formed way. For example, I could say the Ultimate Reason for working at my company is because it pays us. That’s true-ish, but it’s not very useful or meaningful, because the more important question is why do we care about getting paid? Why do we care about working? We’re all doing it, but why? And why look for a shared reason? What’s wrong with having our own? And what’s wrong with having many reasons?

It should be clear that reasons vary across individuals – some people are more interested in pride or contribution or families or weekends than others, etc. etc. – but it may be less clear that they also vary within individuals. Is anyone working at my company for the exclusive reason that they want pride, or for the exclusive reason that they want to provide for their family? Probably they are weighing a whole bunch of reasons, and probably a whole bunch of them conflict, and in all likelihood their satisfaction with working at the company will depend on the day or even minute you ask them. You can look for coherence, but I don’t understand why you would, because I don’t see how that’s useful when brains are inherently incoherent.

Hopefully you saw where I was going with that. If not, I’ve replaced the key words below:

There are a lot of people who live at my universe. We all have different reasons for living there. Some of us want to provide for our families, some of us want to feel like we are contributing, some of us want pride, some of us just want enough financial freedom to afford nights and weekends, etc. These different goals do not prevent us from looking across all livers’ reasons and trying to come up with some Ultimate Reason for living there, but you could only do it in the vaguest and most half-formed way. For example, I could say the Ultimate Reason for living at my universe is because it pays us. That’s true-ish, but it’s not very useful or meaningful, because the more important question is why do we care about getting paid? Why do we care about living? We’re all doing it, but why? And why look for a shared reason? What’s wrong with having our own? And what’s wrong with having many reasons?

It should be clear that reasons vary across individuals – some people are more interested in pride or contribution or families or weekends than others, etc. etc. – but it may be less clear that they also vary within individuals. Is anyone living at my universe for the exclusive reason that they want pride, or for the exclusive reason that they want to provide for their family? Probably they are weighing a whole bunch of reasons, and probably a whole bunch of them conflict, and in all likelihood their satisfaction with living at the universe will depend on the day or even minute you ask them. You can look for coherence, but I don’t understand why you would, because I don’t see how that’s useful when brains are inherently incoherent.

I think this analogy can be used to illustrate why “satisfaction” or “happiness” are awkward as goals. They’re just that Ultimate Reason we are looking for. They’re tautological, which is another way of saying meaningless.

Learning about learning

(The two types of desirable info I proposed in the last post? What I’m about to write about falls [for me] in the second category.)

In A Jane Austen Education¹, William Deresiewicz writes about what he learned from Jane about learning. The lessons were manifested through a professor he had in graduate school, whose style he described as stupid questions and playing dumb. Here are various descriptions I pieced together:

He came across as eccentric, to say the least, if not actually soft in the head, and the impression was not dispelled by the questions he proceeded to ask. They seemed absurdly simple—silly, really, almost stupid, too basic and obvious to ask a class of freshmen, let alone a graduate seminar.

But when we tried to answer them, we discovered that they were not simple in the least. They were profound, because they were about all the things we had come to take for granted.

He was stripping the paint off our brains. He was showing us that everything is open to question, especially the things we thought we already knew. He was teaching us to approach the world with curiosity and humility rather than the professional certainty we were all trying so hard to cultivate. In order to answer his questions, we had to forget everything and start over again from the beginning. “Answers are easy,” he would later say. “You can go out to the street and any fool will give you answers. The trick is to ask the right questions.”

We were graduate students, stepping uncertainly into a new phase of life. No, that actually gives us too much credit. We were coping with feelings of insecurity in an intimidating new world by pretending to know more than we really did, and being rather competitive about it, to boot. My professor was the opposite. He pretended to know less than he did, refused to play the role of wise man or sage. Or rather, he knew that he knew less than he did, because he recognized that everything he knew—all his own assumptions and conceptions—was subject to constant reappraisal.

He taught by provoking, taking us by surprise, making us laugh, throwing us off balance, forcing us to figure out what was going on and what it meant—getting us to think, not telling us how.

If you said something vague or half-formed, he’d pretend to misunderstand you, as if he were slightly dense, so that by fighting your way back to what you really meant, you’d have to figure out what you’d been trying to say in the first place.

I’d catch myself walking out of his office backwards, as if I’d been in the presence of royalty.

So learning is synonymous with questioning. Well, a certain type of questioning, because not all questions are created equal:

He taught by asking questions, and so did I, but only now did I see how utterly different our questions were. Mine were really answers in disguise, as if I were hosting some sadistic from of Jeopardy! I wasn’t a teacher, I was a bully. I wasn’t helping them; I was manipulating them—and doing so, to a far greater extent than I wanted to admit, in order to gratify my own ego. I was telling them what to think, even if, by trying to get them to say it first—that is, by putting words in their mouths—I was pretending not to. I was trying to turn them into little versions of me, instead of better versions of themselves.

When my professor asked a question, it wasn’t because he wanted us to get or guess “the” answer; it was because he hadn’t figured out the answer yet himself, and genuinely wanted to hear what we had to say.

Instead of thinking of a session as a kind of engineering problem—how to transfer a certain quantity of material from my head to my students’—I started to see it as an opportunity to incite them to discover the powers that were waiting, unborn, within them, and in doing so take both themselves and me by surprise. I went from feeling that a good class was one in which I had “gotten my points across” to regarding it as one in which I had learned something myself—not because my learning was the goal, but because if I had found out something new, it meant that I had given my students the freedom to think their way beyond me.

Students don’t come to school with open minds, they come with all the concepts they’ve already acquired, and they can’t wait to project them onto everything they read. If you’re in college, you go hunting for “symbolism” or “foreshadowing” or “Christ figures.” If you’re in graduate school, it’s “constructions of otherness” or “discourses of sexuality” or “the circulation of power.” Either way, you end up with a very elaborate theory that bears no relationship to what’s actually going on in front of you. The job of a teacher, I now understood, is neither to affirm your students’ notions nor to fill them with your own. The job is to free them from both.

Crude summary: Teaching means freeing people from their naïve notions, and it is best done by arousing, by letting them think their own damn thoughts, by asking questions you don’t know the answers to, rather than by trying to inject knowledge into skulls by discipline pump.

What it comes down to is teaching through feeling:

One of the most shocking things about his courses is what they didn’t involve. The rituals of the graduate seminar, all of them devised to turn us into professional scholars, were entirely absent. No lists of secondary sources or packets of supplemental reading, no theoretical frameworks or critical jargon. No seminar papers, even though they were supposed to be the principal means by which we received our training: twenty-page essays, complete with footnotes and a bibliography, our first baby steps in writing for professional publication. Instead, he simply wanted us to write a one-page paper every week. One page, with no citations and no outside reading. Just you and the book and one of the fiendishly simple questions he liked to ask.

Literary study, he was trying to tell us, was not about learning a secret language or mastering a bag of theoretical tricks. It was not about inventing a new, professional personality, either. It was about getting back in touch with the ways we used to read—the ways people read when they’re reading for fun—but also about intensifying them, making them more thoughtful and deeply informed. “Such feelings ought to be investigated, that they may know themselves.” It was about trusting our responses, but examining them, too.

Feelings are the primary way we know about novels—which, after all, are training grounds for responding to the world, imaginative sanctuaries in which to hone and test our ethical judgments and choices. Our feelings are what novelists work with, the colors on their palette. Curiosity, perplexity, exhilaration; the buzz in the brain, the tumult in the soul—that, my professor was telling me, was what I had to work with; that was where my scholarship should start. With the love of reading that had gotten me into graduate school in the first place.

In Pride and Prejudice, I had learned to put thinking above feeling. Now I learned a more complex idea about the relationship between the two. It is good to be in touch with your feelings, but it is even better if you also think about them. Feelings, Austen was saying, are the primary way we know about the world—the human world, anyway, the social world, the people around us. They are what we start with, when it comes to making our ethical judgments and choices.

Learning to read means learning to live. Keeping your eyes open when you’re looking at a book is just a way of teaching yourself to keep them open all the time.

Learning to learn means keeping yourself mentally young:

Now I understood how my professor had managed to stay so young. He never settled into certainty, never stopped challenging himself—and getting us to challenge him—as hard as he challenged us. There was a paradox, I realized, at the heart of Austen’s work. She showed us how to grow up, but she also wanted us to remain young.

The passage that hit me the hardest was when Deresiewicz said that learning these lessons freed him to grow up:

Austen’s work contained a paradox, yet it didn’t have to be a tragedy. You can get older but still remain young. That, I started to realize, was part of what had been keeping me from growing up for all those years, the fear of foreclosing possibilities, of turning into another boring adult with a spouse and a house.

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¹This is now my third (1,2) long post about the book, and I have only read three chapters. There are three more to go, and I might do a long post on each of them, because it has been that good.

I take this book to be strong evidence for my theory that I should choose books based on the writer, not the subject. I would’ve never picked this book up just looking at the cover, but reading Deresiewicz’s commencement inspired me to seek more of his words, and hoo boy I’m glad I did.

Teaching by arousing

It seems that there are two and only two types of information that I crave from writers/philosophers/scientists/anyone trying to teach me something:

1. Stuff that surprises me, throws me off guard, makes me question my unquestioned beliefs.

2. Stuff that I know is true and useful, but just needed to hear clearly articulated in order to have it absorbed into my fleshy software.

Anything in between, all the dry facts and theoretical frameworks and reasonable-sounding ideas, I could do without. That’s actually too gentle. I would pay to do without that stuff.¹ I would make sacrifices to get only the above two types of information and have the rest systematically eradicated like diseased vermin.

Although the two types of information seem to be at opposite ends of the continuum, I think they actually have something important in common: They are both arousing. They both get me riled up, and it is that arousal that leads (necessary? sufficient?) to learning.

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¹Business opportunity, anyone? What if there was a site like Reddit or Digg that filtered information based on these two criteria?

Travelling Solo

I learned today that my company will very likely be sending me back to Alaska in a couple of months. Commence existential vacation planning.

I was last there in August 2009 and, while the whole trip was good, Denali. I so want to go back to Denali. I remember certain moments there as being the most awe-filled moments of my life.

I phrase it that way – “remember as being” rather than “was” – because while I was actually experiencing it I probably would’ve described it as “pretty cool” or something else short of intense awe. But the memories, those faulty bundle of neurons, suggest that this was a profoundly transcendental experience. And so to say that I’ve been itching to go back would be an understatement.

I’ll be going to Alaska with some co-workers whom I really like, and I imagine we’ll probably end up doing some ice fishing or snow shoeing or something equally as awesome. But I’m thinking I’m going to need to extend my stay for a few days or a week, and go it alone.

I’ve only done one other solo-trip, and it was in Miami / the Everglades. It was pretty great, but it was, um, Miami / the Everglades.

Solo-trips are greatly underappreciated, I’d say. Never going on a trip alone seems to me every bit as Missing Out as never having a meal alone. And I don’t mean eating-your-burrito-in-front-of-your-computer alone, I mean truly just you and the food. No other stimulus. When it’s truly just you and the food, the experience is wildly different. Without the pollution of conversation or ideas or social conventions (not that they are “pollution,” but I couldn’t come up with a better term), the food tastes different, or more accurately, it just tastes.

Being alone outside of my house is uncomfortable. I sometimes entertain the idea of dinner at a restaurant alone, not because I can’t find anyone to go with me (okay, I can’t) but because I like the idea of being alone with food. But I have yet to do it (in Durham) because the awkwardness and discomfort dissuade me.

Solo-trips, though, I can do that. For whatever reason, I’m more willing to be adventurous if I am outside of my home city, probably because the relative anonymity ≈ privacy ≈ comfort. (Which is probably a lot of what appeals to me about NYC, the combination of stimuli and, weirdly, “privacy.”)

So I’m probably going to take an existential trip to Denali, which I realize probably sounds horribly cliché to anyone who has seen/read Into the Wild, but I am only vaguely aware of the story, so I am immune to that cliché. I think it might be a good time to try that thing I mentioned wanting to try, which is no interactions with any people at all, written or spoken, email or books, verbal or non-verbal, nothing. 2 days? 3 days? 7 days? I don’t know, but I’ve got to give it at least a day.

I’ll probably try some other stuff, too, like, I dunno, meditating on mountaintops or tackling meese (which I’m convinced should be the plural of moose). Last time I was there the bus driver dude referred to the little prairie dog-looking rodent thingies as “snickers bars for the bears.” That made me want to try one. I wonder if they have a delicious peanut-y core. So many things to explore.

Basically, I’m excited. Brace yourself, Denali. Here I come.

Praise your husbands

The last post relates to something else that has been nagging me the past couple of days. In a (apparently rare) post of marital advice, Auntie Seraphic advises women to perpetually praise their husbands. Here’s the reason she gives:

Not only does this make your husband feel good, it cements in your mind your absolute good fortune in having married such a splendid chap, instead of the sort of chap who might have made you absolutely miserable. This creates a beautiful mental walled city that can withstand the force of any puny annoyances you might have with your husband when you or he is in a temporary bad mood.

She uses fancy language like “beautiful mental walled city,” but what she’s really doing is making delusion sound romantic(!).

This is to me in the same category as “fake it until you make it” advice, which has likewise bothered me since the first day I heard it. I don’t deny that acting as if something is true will make me more likely to believe/feel it is true, but I am very, very uncomfortable with the implicit philosophy of the approach, which suggests that we should be working to assemble a fuzzy and likeable set of beliefs and feelings, without any regard for their validity.

The best argument I’ve heard for such a FIUYMI / delude-yourself philosophy came from Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in the behavioral economics-y book Nudge. I’m going from memory here, but their argument was something like delusion/bias is unavoidable, so we might as well nudge ourselves in the direction of the delusions/biases that benefit us the most.

So, for example, if we’re asking people whether they want to be organ donors, we might as well make the default option “yes,” because which option is default makes an enormous difference in which option people end up choosing. Similarly, if we’re deciding whether to praise our husbands, we might as well make the default behavior “yes,” because which behavior is default makes an enormous difference in how you end up perceiving and feeling about that person.

The logic passes my filters, but it still doesn’t sit well with me. Then again, not much in this mess of a universe does.

The implication for the previous post, about whether it’s possible to non-deludedly know the person you are in a relationship with, is that no, it’s probably not possible, so you might as well nudge yourself in the direction of the delusion that benefits you.

I love my perception of you

I recently heard an intensely emotional story of a young guy falling in dumb love and later learning that the person was not at all who he thought she was. Like really, not at all. The experience, he said, left him feeling jaded with the whole concept of love.

Because of this experience, I would argue that people who are in relationships are actually in love with their own perception of that person. Therefore, most problems in relationships originate from one person's expectations and the degree in which the significant other's actual behavior deviates from those expectations.

Expectations. If you catalogued all the reasons why people break-up, I’d bet you’d find that one of the most common reasons would be something like “violated expectations,” often stated along the lines of “I feel like I don’t even know you anymore.” Some new action or behavior has been witnessed that didn’t fit with mental models of who that person was, and so the whole system of love – built on knowing and understanding the object of your love – was thrown into doubt, leaving the model-holder feeling very, very uncomfortable and wanting more than anything to escape like a child to their mother, to something/someone they know and can trust. The model-holder got an unasked-for peek at reality, which was experienced as unreality, and it scared the living shit out of them.

Maybe I’m being overly dramatic in that description, but I don’t think so. I’ve been referring to the problem as one of violated “expectations,” a very cold and rational term that you might hear an economist use as he speaks of abstract topics in front of his chalkboard, but you’d have the same story if you substituted in the word “trust.” And anyone who has had their trust violated in a serious and seriously unexpected way knows just how emotionally terrorizing it can be.

Trust/expectations are at the foundation of relationships. I don’t think I’d find many people who disagree with that statement, so let’s assume it’s true. Let’s assume it’s true that a relationship without trust is as good as rubble.

Here, then, becomes the question: Can you ever know someone, and not just your mental model of them? Put another way, can you ever legitimately trust your trust in someone? Can a relationship ever be more than a shared illusion?

I wrote a whole bunch after this, but I wasn’t too satisfied with it, so I think it’s best to end with those questions.

Adolescents seeking fulfillment

Finally, my friends (and acquaintances and trolls), we have The Answer. We have been fruitlessly attempting to achieve capital-M Meaning or capital-F Fulfillment without knowing where to find it or how to latch onto its nipple. But finally, mercifully, Anthony Storr identified the capital-A Answer on page 21 of his book (capital-S) Solitude:

Many people have, for one reason or another, learned as children to be over-compliant; that is, to live in ways which were expected of them, or which pleased others, or which were designed not to offend others. These are people who build up what Winnicott called a ‘false self’; that is, a self which is based upon compliance with the wishes of others, rather than being based upon the individual’s own true feelings and instinctive needs. Such an individual ultimately comes to feel that life is pointless and futile, because he is merely adapting to the world rather than experiencing it as a place in which his subjective needs can find fulfillment.

The clincher:

The capacity to be alone thus becomes linked with self-discovery and self-realization; with becoming aware of one’s deepest needs, feelings, and impulses.

The Point: Find some alone time so that you can introspect and get to know your true, non-false, non-others-influenced self – i.e., identify your personal, subjective wants and needs – so that you can get down to the business of going out and individually fulfilling them.

In case you couldn’t tell, I was being sarcastic. I don’t actually think that Storr has identified The Answer. But I think he has done a nice job of pretty naïvely describing the liberal individualist worldview.

I wonder what Storr would have to say about conservative collectivist cultures in Asia and really all over the damn place—would he say that people in China are hopelessly unfulfilled until they find a quiet, lonely place to figure out independently of their families what they want for themselves? If so, would he be right? I suppose it’s possible that he would, but it seems more likely that Storr would be identifying his own (selfish) priorities and wording it in a way that makes it sound like His Answer ought to apply to everyone.

I’m glad I recently read William Deresiewicz’s chapter on adultiness, because otherwise I might’ve been quite sympathetic to Storr’s argument. I’m all about finding some alone time and introspecting and identifying my “true” passions. I am, after all, an individualist. I grew up in Ohio, which I would call the breadbasket of individualism. For me, like for Storr, doing what I personally care about is what I suspect will make me happy and fulfilled. In other words, fuck authority. Fuck “shoulds.” Give me what I want.

But Deresiewicz helped me realize that this worldview is, if not childish, then adolescent-y. To assign that kind of reverence to your feelings and passions is to do what popular music does:

The most important word in popular music today is not “love,” it’s “I.” And the second most important word is “wanna.” Popular music is one giant shout of desire, one great rallying cry for freedom and pleasure. Pop psychology sends us the same signals, and so does advertising. “Trust your feelings,” we are told. “Listen to your heart.” “If it feels good, do it.”

This is not to say that the correct or true Answer lies instead in conservative collectivism. I’m resigned to the fact that I’m hopelessly individualist, and I’m okay with that. But individualism does not have to mean viewing your passions and feelings and desires as sacred objects in need of fulfillment. I can still use my prefrontal cortex (to some extent) to overrule my passions and feelings and desires when they are being dumb, and in fact, if I hope to be adult-y, I probably (ahem) *should.*

Irony like fire

As you’ve probably deduced, I love irony. I employ it freely and generously, often even when inappropriate.

What I want to understand is when/how/why it is and isn’t “appropriate.”

In an essay called E Unibus Pluram, Dave Wallace (ahem, DFW) said this:

Irony is not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As Hyde (whom I pretty obviously like) puts it, “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.”

This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in soundbites. I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly fun to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing but trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow… oppressed.

When I saw the term “ground-clearing,” my mind went immediately to wildfires, and it occurs to me that that’s a pretty informative analogy. Irony/mockery/sarcasm, as I see it, is a pretty potent lens through which to clear some of the flimsy or inferior mental brush by examining it with a skewed, almost angry distance and magnifying (and thereby destroying) it as ridiculous or sad.

That’s what irony/mockery/sarcasm is good for. But three cautions:

1. Like wildfires, irony/mockery/sarcasm has a tendency to clear not just the flimsy, inferior stuff but also some of the sturdy, good stuff.

2. While irony, like wildfire, may provide a more fertile ground for things to grow, the irony/fire itself cannot grow anything. That requires a much slower and more delicate process.

3. Irony/mockery/sarcasm, like wildfire, can sometimes spread, well, wildly, changing directions suddenly and jumping over roads, rivers, and firebreaks into residential neighborhoods and into your own precious intellectual backyard.

My conclusion, then, is that trying to suppress irony/mockery/sarcasm in some attempt at Perfect Sincerity is every bit as unwise as trying to suppress wildfires, but be very, very cautious of overuse because it is singularly destructive (incapable of being constructive) and risks spreading into precious, personal territory.

A fourth caution: While it’s okay – good, even – to let these intellectual wildfires happen inside your own skull, you should probably be wary of letting them penetrate too deeply your interactions with other people. Here’s DFW again:

And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I’m saying.”

So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: “How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.”

Adultiness

What does it mean to be adult-y? Is it something I should (or do) care about?

These are the questions that nag my brain whenever I find myself laughing at scatological humor.

Let’s start by making a list of what adultiness is not:

• going to school and getting a job
• passing tests, gaining admissions, accumulating credentials
• marriages, babies, home ownerships
• naps, grape nuts, oatmeal, prostate exams

The Point: Adultiness is not the same as doing things that adults do.

So then what is it? A feeling? Maybe does it mean feeling confident and secure in your independence and responsibilities or some such?

Mmm, probably not. In A Jane Austen Education, William Deresiewicz describes the lessons he learned about adultiness through reading Pride and Prejudice. Adultiness is absolutely not a feeling of confidence, he says. In fact, it’s pretty much the opposite.

If anything, self-confidence and self-esteem are the great enemies, because they make you forget that you’re still just a bundle of impulse and ignorance.

The problem of so many young people is that they have too great a belief in their own feelings. They achieved the relative autonomy of adolescence—learning to trust yourself—but now they have to take the next step, into the full autonomy of adulthood. They need to learn to doubt themselves.

“Life is a comedy for those who think,” said Horace Walpole, “and a tragedy for those who feel.” Everyone thinks, and everyone feels, but Jane Austen’s question was, which are you going to put first?

Being adult-y, he/Jane says, means putting thinking before feeling. That doesn’t mean giving up your feelings, but it means giving up your belief in your feelings, your conviction that they are always right.

This was not easy to swallow. We tend to believe that our emotions are reliable indicators of the way things are in the world. How many times have you heard someone say, “I have a good feeling about this”—a college application, a lottery ticket, a new relationship—only to discover that things don’t necessary work out just because we have a good feeling about them? Older relatives are particularly fond of these kinds of pronouncements. “I know you’ll do well.” “I can’t imagine they won’t hire you.” “I’m sure everything will work out fine.” Really? You’re sure? What makes you so sure? Just because you happen to like me?

It’s important to doubt ourselves – our feelings – because by default we tend to see ourselves as glorious, flawless protagonists of the world’s story. Growing up, he says, means coming to see yourself from the outside, as one very limited (stupid, smelly) creature.

The first part of being adult-y, then, means honestly acknowledging your flaws.

Errors are not accidents that could have been avoided; they are expressions of character. You don’t “fix” your mistakes, Austen was telling us, as if they somehow existed outside you, and you can’t prevent them from happening, either. You aren’t born perfect and only need to develop the self-confidence and self-esteem with which to express your wondrous perfection. You are born with a whole novel’s worth of errors ahead of you. You can’t save yourself from your mistakes, but maybe your mistakes can save you from yourself.

The next part is feeling ashamed, disgraced, and humiliated by them.

Shame, humiliation, disgrace: hard feelings to accept if you’ve been brought up to believe that you should never have to experience any pain.

Our egos, Austen was telling me, prevent us from owning up to our errors and flaws, and so our egos must be broken down—exactly what humiliation does, and why it makes us feel so worthless. “Humiliation,” after all, comes from “humility.” It humbles us, makes us properly humble. So just as Pride and Prejudice taught me that it’s okay to make mistakes, it also told me that it’s okay to feel bad about them. Austen understood that growing up hurts—that it has to hurt, because otherwise it won’t happen.

The final step of adultiness, after noticing your flaws and feeling them, is remembering them.

It takes courage to admit your mistakes, and even more courage to remember them. How tempting it is to rewrite our personal history in a more flattering way, and how familiar we all are with the person who experiences a moment of self-knowledge—after a breakup or a failure or a sin—only to go right back to being the same person they always were. For Austen, maturation means refusing to forget. Humiliation is a gift that keeps on giving.

If you do growing up right, it never stops. Not only weren’t you born perfect, you are never going to be perfect, either. Becoming an adult is not going to give you the right to become complacent.

This is kind of a downer, isn’t it? To view adulthood as perpetual humiliation? As a downplaying of your passions and feelings?

Not so, says Deresiewicz:

Learning this lesson was oddly liberating. Just because I thought that another person had done something to me, I was now forced to acknowledge, didn’t mean that I was right. I might be offended by something they had said, but maybe I’d misunderstood them. I might be mad because they were getting ugly with me, but maybe I had started it. Feelings are always about something, and that “something” is not itself a feeling. It’s an idea, a perception of a situation. And because ideas can be wrong, the emotions that are based on them can also be wrong. So now I had a way to let go of my feelings when they weren’t legitimate—when they weren’t correct. I could acknowledge my emotions, but I didn’t have to be controlled by them.

Personally, I really like this definition of adultiness, but I might be biased. It excuses my tendency to put thinking ahead of feeling, my proclivity toward humiliation and insecurity, and, perhaps best of all, it permits me to keep laughing at scatological humor.

Taking life seriously

When Anna pointed out that there is a dating site that matches people on book preferences, I scoffed.

Who wants to be matched on book preferences? Not me. I read travel journals about fern societies. (Great book, by the way.)

More to the point, book preferences seem too intellectual/random to say very much about a person.

But then I realized something. While it’s true that which books in particular you prefer probably doesn’t carry a lot of predictive capacity, the tone of the books probably does.

This is grossly oversimplified, but here are what I perceive to be the main categories of “tone”:

“Life in all its ordinariness is Important, and deadly serious.” If you have read anything by DFW, then you know this tone. DFW took life deadly seriously, but the ordinary parts, the “real” parts. He added humor, presumably to relieve tension, but I get the feeling reading his stuff that the overall tone is very, very serious. If this is the only type of stuff you read, then I imagine you are pretty uptight.

“Hey, look, there are certain subsets of Life that are deadly serious and Important; everything else you can ignore.” I feel like this category occupies 74% of the volume of non-fiction library shelves. Choose your favorite category: Communication is important; Relationships are important; Global warming is important; Economics is important; etc. etc. If this is the only type of stuff you read, then I’ll probably want to ask you about what you find important and why, and then respectfully leave you alone.

“I’m not going to make any value judgments about what’s “important”; I’m just consuming what interests me, OKAY??” This is closely related to the previous category. Like that category, this is usually topical stuff, but the difference is that this stuff carries no tone of importance.

“Life, what? I thought we were just in theory-land.” This is a lot of what you find on university bookshelves. It’s the type of stuff that feeds academic minds. If this is all you read, then I’ll probably want to ask you about your mental models and what they do for you, and then respectfully leave you alone.

“Why bother with Reality when I can escape to the supernaturally fantastic?” I perceive this to be a large portion of the fiction collection (although I don’t read much fiction so I can’t say that with much confidence). It’d be fair to say that I don’t understand these people.

“Hehe, isn’t Life amusing and cute?” These books seem to be pretty uncommon. At least at my library, the Humor & Wit section is about 2.5 shelves on one bookcase, and included in the Humor & Wit section is DFW and Jonathan Franzen, so it’s certainly not all light-hearted stuff. If this is all you read, then I will probably find you frustrating. If you don’t read this at all, then I will probably find you frustrating.

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This post has been about book preferences and what they say about you, but the broader point is that an important distinguishing characteristic of books and of people – I’d even argue the most important distinguishing characteristic – is how seriously they take life.

My personal preference – what I want to see in other people – is that they mix it up, that they consume both the serious and the unserious. In particular, I want to see them consume some of the deadly serious DFW-like stuff (category #1) and also some of the light-hearted life-is-amusing stuff (category #6). I really don’t care about any of the categories in between.

I don’t know how to defend that feeling except to say it’s a personal preference. But there we are.

A day in the life of attention

I don’t like the term “attention whore.” It’s rude. I prefer “attention magnet.” Also acceptable is “attention magnet with sex appeal.”

It’s nice to be paid attention to. Well, sometimes. Examples from today perfectly illustrate what I mean.

Attention Event #1: 7:55AM, Khan (the dog): “If you really loved me you would get out of bed and make me breakfast.”

Attention Event #2: 9:15AM, 10:50AM, 2:20PM, anonymous supervisor: “How’s it coming on that thingy?” “Looking good, except for this, this, and this.” “Oh and this, this, and this, too.”

Missed Attention Opportunity #1: 5:20PM, racquetball court: “Excellent angle on that passing shot, Self. And the height and depth on that ceiling ball—practically perfection. It’s a shame these people standing around don’t notice or appreciate your subtle display of skill and finesse, because you’re putting on a show right now.”

Attention Event #3: 6:40PM, Durham County Library: “Um, did that shaggy-haired and vaguely-sweaty dude just return a book called Everything I needed to know about being a girl I learned from Judy Blume? And, wait, did he just pick up that?”

Attention Event #4: 7:10PM, Khan: “If you really loved me you would give me that sausage.”

Attention Event #5: 7:20PM, email: “A female read your blog and she thinks you are quote unquote ‘adorable’.”

Um what what what? It is unclear whether said female found my *writing* ‘adorable’ (unlikely) or, more likely, she looked at my profile image, failed to notice the irony and the fakeness, and perceived “me” (i.e., douche-y Ashton Kutcher photo) to be physically attractive. Sigh.

At this point I was feeling that these attention events – some frustrating, others meh, others awkward – were leaving a bit to be desired. And then it happened.

Attention Event #6:

David Hayes responded to yesterday’s post in – wait for it – 1,980 words. (Yes, I counted.) Not only did he do so on his birthday, he called this discussion “one of the most important things currently going on in my life.” I am not sure whether I should feel pity or flattery. I choose flattery.

It is intensely flattering to have someone – and especially someone like David – respect your opinions and questions so much (opinions and questions which, by the way, were posted on a blogspot.com webpage flanked by an especially douche-y image of Ashton Kutcher) to give them that kind of attention.

If I can keep getting that kind of attention, then I will enthusiastically embrace “attention whore.” (But I still prefer “attention magnet with sex appeal.”)

The case against better

Subtitle: I am not a single coherent mental entity self-aware of well-defined preferences. (Thanks, Xan.)

I like David Hayes a lot. He’s a very thoughtful fellow and he’s willing to engage me, without getting too fidgety, when I start questioning the obvious.

What’s obvious to him is that striving for better is, well, better. It beats worse or the same, he says.

Posing it that way, we have nothing to argue about other than semantics. Instead of going there, here would be my response: How do you know what’s “better”?

• Is it a personal preference? If not, then what is it?
• What if my idea of striving for better (let’s call it a “priority”) is watching the Kardashians all day? Does that count? If not, why not?
• How consistent are priorities across time and across contexts?
• What do you do when your priorities conflict?
• What do you do when your priorities conflict with others’ priorities?
• How many of these priorities are under your control, and to what extent?
• How do you know which priorities are under your control, and to what extent?
• Of those that are highly under your control, are there some that have better ROI than others? How do you account for that?

Okay, I’ll stop questioning and give you my opinion: It seems to me that the idea of “betterness” is so messy and subjective that it’s unhelpful at best, meaningless at worst. Ultimately when I hear someone say that they are striving for better, it sounds like they are saying they are trying to do something that they think they should be doing. And how they determine what they *should* be doing, well, that gets even messier.

Versatile words

In The Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson identifies America’s greatest gift to international discourse:

Of all the new words to issue from the New World, the quintessential Americanism without any doubt was OK. Arguably American’s single greatest gift to international discourse, OK is the most grammatically versatile of words, able to serve as an adjective (“Lunch was OK”), verb (“Can you OK this for me?”), noun (“I need your OK on this”), interjection (“OK, I hear you”), and adverb (“We did OK”). It can carry shades of meaning that range from casual assent (“Shall we go?” “OK”), to great enthusiasm (“OK!”), to lukewarm endorsement (“The party was OK”), to a more or less meaningless filler of space (“OK, can I have your attention please?”).

But we don’t even know where it came from or how to spell it(!):

It is a curious fact that the most successful and widespread of all English words, naturalized as an affirmation into almost every language in the world, from Serbo-Croatian to Tagalog, is one that has no correct agreed spelling (it can be O.K., OK, or okay) and one whose origins are so obscure that it has been a matter of heated dispute almost since it first appeared.

He then went into detail about what those origins might’ve been. Google it if you feel so inclined.

Did this remind you of the other ever-so-versatile word? It did me, and so I was glad to see Bryson write about it 50 pages later:

After OK, fuck must be about the most versatile of all English words. It can be used to describe a multitude of conditions and phenomena, from making a mess of something (fuck up) to being casual or provocative (fuck around), to inviting or announcing a departure (fuck off), to being estimable (fucking-A), to being baffled (I’m fucked if I know), to being disgusted (fuck this), and so on and on and on.

Fuck probably reached its zenith during the Second World War. Most people are familiar with the army term snafu (short for “situation normal—all fucked up”), but there were many others in common currency then, among them fubar (“fucked up beyond all recognition”) and fubb (“fucked up beyond belief”).

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Almost related:

There was an HBO special called “Talking Funny” where for an hour Jerry Seinfeld, Louis CK, Chris Rock, and Ricky Gervais discussed the craft of stand-up comedy. (It’s free online if you Google hard enough.) About 35 minutes in, Seinfeld gets asked why his comedy is “clean” and whether it has always been that way. His response was that his comedy wasn’t clean when he was “coming up,” but that changed when he realized that one of his jokes couldn’t be funny without the word “fuck.” Essentially, he saw “fuck” serving as a kind of crutch, one that suggested that the joke maybe wasn’t all that good, and one that suggested that he might’ve been acting more out of fear than skill. And that, he says, is why he stopped using profanity.

Ooo, literacy

My mom, a 4th grade teacher, is taking a class on teaching reading. She shared with me some stats about how students read, on average, less than 10 pages a day and how 80% of books are read by 10% of people. She then asked me these questions:

That reminded me of you in high school. As I recall, you didn't really like to read or write. When/how did that change for you? College? After college? When did you really start writing things that weren't assigned? What motivated you?

That’s her gentle way of saying that in high school the only reading and writing I did happened inside of chat boxes (“lol” “brb”).¹

Before I start responding to Mom’s questions, I want to say that I’m skeptical of the educational reverence that is typically assigned to reading and writing. I vaguely recall a poster in an elementary school classroom that showed a kid reading a book with pages that literally lit up his face with glowing insights, and there might’ve even been mythical creatures and swirling planets and things.

If the poster’s point was that reading will spark the flame of a child’s imagination, then my response is that kids’ imaginations don’t need your help. Just give me an oversized cardboard box and I’ll keep myself amused for hours.

But the propaganda worked… for a while. I consumed R.L. Stine books by the tote-bag-load. Mostly, though, I consumed the covers. Any words that I consumed were merely an effort to find out why the covers were so interesting and scary.

And then I got older, and girls became more interesting than Say Cheese and Die!, so I put my reading career on an early retirement, not to be picked up again for over a decade. And the truth is that I don’t feel that my lapse cost me in any serious way. I consumed an incredible amount of cultural junk food all through grade school and college, and while I’m not pleased with the “lost” time, I don’t feel that I’d be remarkably better off had I instead consumed the classics. More likely, I would’ve felt bored. And like a fraud.

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What motivated me to come back from retirement? It was a series of things.

In my final semester of college, I was in a small reading group with an amazing economics professor (and person) named Stephen Margolis, and just witnessing the way he thinks, his ability to take a sentence from a book and talk about all the things it means, it absolutely dropped my intellectual panties. I wanted to be able to do that.

Needless to say, I wanted to read what he was reading, and I think at some point I heard him mention his daily reads, including Craig Newmark’s blog. So I started following that, which led to following Marginal Revolution and Freakonomics, which led to reading Tyler Cowen’s and Steven Levitt’s books, which led to other blogs and books, which eventually led me to read so many inspiring things that I felt a biological urge to start sharing stuff through a blog of my own, which forced me to write. Which led me to where I am today, reading more than a book a week and writing (at least during January) 1,500 words per day, roughly equivalent to writing a book every 30 days.

To backtrack a little, actually what got me writing semi-regularly was a crush in college. I was crazy for this girl, and I thought maybe she might like me too, but she had a boyfriend, and so it was a couple of years of romantic torment where I had all of these thoughts that were chewing away at my brain, and a little pressure release in the form of some notebooking was about all I could do to mentally survive.²

It’s fitting that I mention that because writing for me pretty much remains that way. I think we’re taught that reading and writing are like eating our vegetables, that they are nice, nutritious skills to have for learning and for professional survival in a world of email. But it shouldn’t be true that that’s why we do them. At least not writing. Reading to me is pretty vegetable-like in that it’s mainly just something I do for learning or amusement, but writing has become so much more important to me than veggie-like nutrition. It is my means of processing the world, of thinking. And probably most importantly it is my means of purging all the gunk that’s building up, the stuff that is bothering me. I call it “cleansing my psychospiritual colon.”

Maybe it’s similar to emptying your soul to a shrink or to a close friend, but it needn’t be dark stuff. For me, it usually isn’t. Most of the time it’s intellectual stuff or petty personal stuff that is bothering me. Before writing regularly, I may have “released” psychospiritual pressure by hitting a tennis ball extra hard or something, which as you might imagine, wasn’t terribly effective. I put “released” in quotes because hitting a tennis ball extra hard isn’t actually releasing anything; it’s just acting on an emotion. I’ve found that the release only comes through understanding better what bothers me. And without exception, writing helps me understand things better. Sometimes amazingly better.

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This, I understand, is not very useful information for a teacher to hear. You can’t take this back to your 4th graders and say, “hey kids, you should write because my 26 year old son uses it to think and stuff.” The unfortunate truth is that they will probably have to discover it on their own.

The consolation is that not everyone will value or needs to value writing like I do. People find their own ways to think, and their own ways to deal with what bothers them. This is just what works for me, and I discovered it completely by accident.

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Update 1/30: Mom probed for some practical tips on how she can inspire her students like Margolis did me, and here was my response:

Probably what did it for me was this:

1) I chose to be there in this reading group. I was already interested in the professor and the subject.
2) It was a small group -- 2 or 3 people -- so the feedback was very personalized.
3) And since it was a small group it felt like I was part of something special or important that was apart from the ordinary school routine, something that could give me an intellectual leg up on the other kids.
4) I was old enough, interested enough, and smart enough to recognize that this guy's intellect was amazing and "earned" (not in-born) and achievable by me.
5) Even though the effect was powerful, it didn't last. It lasted long enough to get me interested in reading things, and the effect of that lasted long enough to get me interested enough to start writing, but these things happened by chance, and are not something I would expect to be repeatable.

In other words, I unfortunately don't think it's possible to get the same effect in a classroom of 4th graders. You can try various things to inspire them, as you probably already do, but I wouldn't expect any of the kind of "breakthroughs" like I had because it seems that these things are happenstance and fortuitous and non-repeatable.

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¹I think my HS girlfriend might’ve saved some of our IM conversations, which is probably the most frightening thing I know.

²She eventually broke up with her boyfriend. This is the girl I was with for ~3.5 years.

“Sadness is beautiful”

This is another post that is not for the faint of philosophical heart – meaning you might/probably want to skip it – but sometimes when I hear certain seemingly-profound but also vague phrases I feel the urge to rhetorically question them to death.

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“Sadness is beautiful”

Sounds like something you might read on a billboard, doesn’t it? Perhaps one that’s trying to sell jeans to angst-ridden teens.

But that’s not where I heard it. I heard it from some very smart and interesting people over on my private blog. Here were some of their comments about it:

The violin is something that is simultaneously sad and beautiful.

Powerful feelings can be intensely beautiful, even powerful 'negative' feelings. Much of my favorite music has nearly unbearable tension in it, and that's exactly what I like about it.

Watch out. Here come the rhetorical questions.

If all the feelings are beautiful, presumably because you’ve looked at them closely and saw their symmetry and power and intricacy or some such, is there anything in the universe that, upon close inspection, is not beautiful? If not, then how is it meaningful or descriptive to call anything “beautiful”?

Is it meaningful to say that the color yellow is beautiful? Is it even meaningful to say that the color yellow is beautiful when it is an especially intense or an especially rich hue?

Or is the color yellow only beautiful when used certain ways, like in a painting? If so, is it the color that is beautiful, or is it the painting?

I’d say neither. It is only beautiful when a person notices (if only subconsciously) how the yellow is used in a work of art, and how it shows some kind of symmetry or harmony or proportion, etc. Beauty, like humor, seems to be a subjective (lonely) intellectual experience.

And I hate to get semantic on your asses, but what do we mean by “beautiful”? That it in some way delights the senses?

If so, then how, exactly, does sadness or any other “negative” feeling delight the senses? Is this a detached intellectual appreciation or enjoyment, as if we’re outside our bodies looking back and going, “huh, that’s kind of neat”? Or are you experiencing your blueness in all its blueness and actually finding that the experience is physically pleasant, as in “whoa, this misery feels great!”?

I can certainly understand calling a feeling, even a “negative” one like sadness or anxiety or anger, useful or valuable or important. “Beautiful,” though, that’s harder for me to see, at least it’s hard for me to see in any way that seems meaningful.