Unless you are in the 99th percentile of discipline and self-control you will fall. Such excellence shouldn’t be required to make it through a day, but it now is in our casino-like modern world. If some pleasure is good, more is better. If some money is good, more is better. And so, 5 grams becomes 50. The limiting principle is, presumably, an amount that’s so high it’s no longer pleasurable, but then we will just fall back to 50 – an amount nearly impossible to resist. Or maybe the limit will be an efficacy loss from repeated exposure? You suck down 50g so many times the rush is gone and you look for the next high. And then we get to a place where all the highs have been tapped and the board suggests selling lows as the “the new high”?

Those hypothetical limits are only hypothetical in our current trap of convenient pleasure.

What a splendid pie, pizza-pizza pie
Every minute, every second, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy
What a splendid pie, pizza-pizza pie
Every minute, every second, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy
Pepperoni and green peppers, mushrooms, olive, chives
Pepperoni and green peppers, mushrooms, olive, chives
Need therapy, therapy, advertising causes
Need therapy, therapy, advertising causes
Need therapy, therapy, advertising causes
Therapy, therapy, advertising causes

You really think with billions spent selling pleasure you can resist? You think with c-corps hiring the very best to manipulate your mind, a la casinos, you can just try a little? You think your “free will” matters in this? Ha. Lay’s told you the truth in 1983: NO ONE CAN EAT JUST ONE. And just think how much more sophisticated the salesmen have become in the intervening years.

I once thought Stan was so correct:

Dad, you like to drink. So have a drink every once in a while. Have two. If you devote your whole life to completely avoiding something you like, then that thing still controls your life and you’ve never learned any discipline at all … All or nothing is easy. But learning to drink a little bit responsibly, that’s a discipline. 

Sure, I still think moderation is possible, but I think the number who can do it well is rapidly diminishing as more and more and more stuff is tossed in the “Requires Discipline” bucket. Because while you may properly control your impulses with drinking, you have to fight that same battle on the tv, phone, porn, gambling, and food fronts as well. A safe haven simply doesn’t exist in 2022. Thus it’s a minor miracle if you only capitulate a few times in a day.

You’ll rebrand these capitulations as “moderation,” as if some amount of a bad thing is ok. Make no mistake, by taking cheap pleasures, your ability to capture real, sustaining pleasures, ones that are only accessible from extreme resistance to the present self’s desires, are greatly diminished. So diminished, in fact, you may well forget they exist. That is what the c-corps want, after all. They want you to think the highest form of pleasure is, indeed, eating a chip. And if you do still see that as the lie it is, can you muster the massive effort required to end the surrenders? That effort requires an understanding that the very notion of moderation is being aggressively sold by those same c-corps so you don’t ask whether nothing may well be the better choice.

I’m increasingly thinking nothing is.

will let you know she’s interested without explicitly saying so, the inverse is also true: a disinterested woman will let you know she doesn’t like you without explicitly saying so.

Importantly, the inverse is more broadly true since everyone prefers delivering good news. So, yes, sometimes a woman will explicitly say “I like you,” and those times will outnumber occasions when she says, “I don’t like you.”

The implicit disinterest may be so obvious nobody could miss it (e.g., ghosting), but infatuation, love, and lust can do weird things to even usually well-calibrated social sensors. What you would clearly see as Dude, that girl so doesn’t like you if you friend was telling the story becomes Maybe she lost her phone when it’s your story.

Someone must rise above cowardice. The woman and her I don’t want to hurt him mentality is cowardly. The man and his refusal to see clearly is also being a coward. The woman is protected by a society that cheers untruths that protect feelings. Yes, I love that shirt (that you hate); Dinner was incredible (when it totally wasn’t); and I really had a fun time (when you were praying for it to end). Correcting this social norm will take too much effort – especially since many people would see the above instances as kindness – so we must focus on the man.

There are three interrelated reasons the man misses the disinterest. The first is, obviously, the fact that nobody likes to be rejected. Me??!? How could she not like ME????? The second is that since nothing is explicit, there were, barring a total catastrophe, a few wins one could reasonably put on the She’s Into Me side of the ledger. In a world of “signals,” well-intentioned people can miss them. So what if you are wrong? You think she’s not into it when she is and you prematurely cut it off. This fear is the third reason.

Fortunately, a woman will let you know if she’s interested, so in any 50/50 situation, you can default to not being a coward and ending that which she herself can’t end since if you are wrong, if she was actually interested, she’ll find a way to let you know you erred in your conclusion.

is driven by merely having something to talk about? Craving a bag of easy conversation topics is closely related to having desires driven by social prestige – you want to be a lawyer because society values lawyers – but is more rudimentary: most conversations will stay in small-talk territory and naming the new restaurant you tried is more enjoyable (and more ego-boosting) than rain pattern breakdowns.

Anyone trained on the mean streets of our dog-eat-dog economy is constantly on guard for the bait-and-switch, the fine print, and the “free credits” that aren’t really “free.” Thankfully, the calendar has been devoid of such shenanigans. When you buy something tied to a specific date, and especially when that something isn’t reliant on production supplies, you get it. Thus, the modern social contract reads something like,  “Yes, go aggressively make money. Even rip people off. We are okay with that. Just don’t start messing with time.”

xxxxxxxxx chose to disregard society’s very firm (time)line in the sand. Knowing full well when she would and would not be home (calendars are powerful, practical, and ubiquitous), xxxxxxxxx listed her property on Airbnb when it wasn’t actually available. She did this, this messing with time, as some maleficent marketing. No apologies. No “oops, I forgot to uncheck those weeks.” Just straight pushing me toward a “special offer” and requesting I come 14 days earlier, as if travelers are randomly picking the week they purchase and can seamlessly pivot. The audacity of such behavior is only possible from someone attempting to corrupt the underpinnings of our great modern society. It’s either we go back to sundials… or we excommunicate xxxxxxxxx. 

Sic ‘em. Woof, woof, woof!

will eventually lose because the coolest, smartest, and most emulatable kids of any generation rebel against overbearing falseness. It can take a long time for the overturning because most will do what they are told, but the coolest, smartest, and most emulatable ultimately set society’s course, and so what they believe becomes the “answer,” even if the majority still disagree.

Supreme anger and motivation are not normal reactions to Don’t Look Up. The anger, sure, Adam McKay hoped you would feel that. But motivation? Inspiration? Not on some grand political level, but on a personal level? Yet, here I am deeply motivated to change my own life.

My how we have become a deeply unserious people. We spend so much of our time listening to absolute buffoons talk about absolutely irrelevant stuff. We rapturously watch vapid people live their shallow lives. And then we complain about all of it … only to turn on The Bachelor as soon as the new season commences. Twenty-six seasons!!! How? Why? This is the anger. This is the don’t blame the media since they are only what they are because that is what we will buy. This is also the smugness, the looking down on all those people who stupidly consume trash TV and who consider themselves “informed” after “reading” takes from partisan hacks who are so clearly not thinking completely that a total novice could listen to them once, with no background information, and ask them obviously important questions that any serious person who seriously was after the truth would have investigated and yet when asked such questions, tada, the hollow mind tasked with nobly carrying the “news” to the population meekly says, “Let me get back to you on that.” And so when you are the person who not only knows the questions but the answers, you get to feel all smart. You’ll ask the heavens why people don’t just drop the hacks and come roam with the real minds, but you’ll not actually want them to join you, for then you’ll lose your aura of superiority. When everyone knows what you know, how will anyone know you are smart?

But that pretension isn’t the problem per se because it’s all quite accurate. The problem is that its accuracy lets you off the hook. While you might not be watching Keeping Up With the Kardashians, are you really 100% hardcore devoted to only SERIOUS things? Like, are sports all that different from reality TV? And isn’t all wandering on the Internet equally unproductive, not just scrolling through celebrity blogs? If you browse “smart” content without ever giving over your attention, who cares if it’s smart? Checked out and passing time is checked out and passing time. You might soothe yourself with rationalizations of how there’s the chance you’ll learn something important that the celebrity-blog-checker doesn’t have, but how often has that long-shot hit?

(more…)

Distraction, like addiction, comes in many forms. And just like addiction, the fundamental texture of distraction is wanting.

This, whatever this is, isn’t good enough for my complete attention, so give me something else and surely I’ll feel better. The greater the boredom, the greater the distraction temptation.

Increasingly, though, the temptation seems untethered to anything that can plausibly be called “boredom.” It’s more of a twitch to split my attention just ’cause, and to do so across tiny time horizons. This is not about having music on in the background for an extended study session; this is about craving to turn on the TV – to an absolutely irrelevant sporting event – while I walk to the kitchen to put dishes in the dishwasher. That chore is so minute, so quick, so easy: there can’t be true boredom in it. What it is, rather, is my mind increasingly rejecting doing one thing at once. I must listen to a podcast while changing clothes. I must open a second tab while the first one loads. I must read AND listen to music while I eat.

(more…)

Do you actually know it’s wrong, a lie, another bit of misinformation?

Or do you just hate the people associated with the thing?

Making sure the last question isn’t “yes” is an easy way to increase your attachment to what is real.

is a great way to avoid the emptiness of truly being in the moment. You say you want the moment, but you really don’t. You want to have something to look forward to. You want to have something to take your mind off the boredom inherent to the moment.

So go ahead and check the weather (even as you are one foot from stepping outside), or the scores (even as it’s still the first quarter and you checked, what, two minutes ago), or your texts (even as your dings are turned on and you haven’t heard any). Just do it. It feels so good. And that goodness never expires – you can just check again in the next moment because it’s always possible that something has changed.