Josh Haas's Web Log

Murakami is another one of my favorite authors (especially Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle).

So I have to post this passage from a great essay on his work:

Some have found Murakami’s deployment of fantastical elements in his fiction to be fey or under-justified. His own reasoning about the practice, in a 2004 Paris Review interview with John Wray, is revealing: “We are living in a fake world; we are watching fake evening news. We are fighting a fake war. Our government is fake. But we find reality in this fake world. So our stories are the same; we are walking through fake scenes, but ourselves, as we walk through these scenes, are real. The situation is real, in the sense that it’s a commitment, it’s a true relationship.” So, too, in Murakami’s novels, events might be unnatural and outré, but the characters are as human as possible. Murakami achieves this in two ways: first, by an unrushed, tender cataloguing of small daily action (preparing “steaming food”), and second, by the lovingly humorous imagining of his characters’ inner chatter. Here is Aomame, in a moment of downtime: “That was the most she could get herself to do — stare at the ceiling. Not that the ceiling had anything of interest about it. But she couldn’t complain. Ceilings weren’t put on rooms to amuse people.”

Compare to my post from a month ago on Scott Pilgrim:

The fascinating thing about the graphic novels, though, is that while the formal elements are completely artificial, the content — i.e., the characters and their inner journeys — feels real. Scott and Ramona awkwardly date, they fall in love, fight, split, and get back together as they learn to be a couple, while at the same time their friends have their own challenges and breakthroughs. Mixed in with the surreal plot points are ordinary slice-of-life scenes where the characters do things like grabbing burgers and building bonfires on the beach.

It’s impossible to be a participant in this dance we call “the economy” without noticing that things are a little messed up. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, and I’m still trying to sort it all through. I want to think out loud for a bit here, to see if anything becomes clearer.

One thing that’s really important to me on a personal level is making sure that the conversations about the economy — which really means, the conversations about how we all relate to one another — are filled with joy rather than pessimism. I feel like that’s a weird thing to say, because there’s such a deeply entrenched pessimism right now in any vaguely economic or political conversation that even mentioning the word “joy” feels out of touch. How can there be joy when so many people feel powerless and scared about the situation? It’s kind of like screaming “let them eat cake!” from the top of the Empire State Building.

Nevertheless, I’m gonna come out as pro-joy for a couple of reasons:

* There’s still a lot to be happy about. There’s always a lot to be happy about. There are things to be happy about even in the direst poverty and oppression, and for most people taking place in these conversations we’re a long way away from dire.

* I think the reason we’re on this Earth is to create and contribute, to transcend our limitations and bring amazing things into being. I don’t mean this in a flippant way at all, but I fucking love this video: Gangnam Style. Look at that dude in the elevator. I mean, come on. It restores my faith in humanity. I’m serious — the subtext for this whole thing is class conflict / economic disparity in Korea, and what we get is that dude in the elevator, and an 5-year-old busting crazy dance moves. So anyway, I feel like if we don’t deal with the big social issues of our times with joy and optimism and sense of gratitude that we get to be a part of it at all (as opposed to, say, not born in the first place), we’re kind of missing the point.

* I have this intuition that joy is an important part of the solution

Anyway, that said, optimism alone won’t make the world go round. There’s still some hard work to be done to figure out how to move forward constructively. My sense is that there’s a need for a major overhaul of our collective conventional wisdom about political / economic philosophy, since to me this feels like a “we don’t know what direction to go in” situation, not a “we know the right direction and it’s just a lot of work” situation. A lot of smarter people than me are putting their minds to it, so part of me just wants to kick back with a beer for a few years and see how it all sorts out, but that wouldn’t be very responsible now, would it?

So here’s the brain dump. These are various things that I suspect or that I have questions about:

* I don’t believe that the advancement of technology will solve our economic woes. I believe that technology increases the net wealth in society, but I think the reason people are unhappy is not that there’s not enough wealth, but that it’s not being distributed well. I think that technology, in a capitalist system, actually hurts distribution rather than helps, because it tends to create bigger and bigger winners while destroying jobs. This is obviously something I think about a lot, since what I’m doing with my life right now is advancing the state of technology. I do think tech is a good thing, though, see below.

* I don’t believe in “job creation” as a goal. I think most jobs that are getting destroyed by technology aren’t fulfilling, worthwhile uses of people’s time to begin with. Do we really want to be doing stuff that computers can do better and faster? People are upset when jobs go away, because the notion of a “job” is how we currently believe wealth should be transferred to people, but to me it’s a good thing that we’re finding ourselves in a situation where we don’t actually need the labor of the vast majority of society in order to produce everything we want to produce. There’s a reason that there’s the phrase “wage-slavery”. So it bothers me that the political rhetoric is all about “creating jobs” because that’s not the real problem — the real problem is that people are getting economically and politically disempowered because jobs used to be the proxy mechanism by which people got to participate in society.

* I suspect that we overvalue central, top-down solutions. It’s kind of weird to me that everyone blames the serving president for the economy. This is just taken at face-value; if the economy is good, president gets re-elected, if economy is bad, president gets punished. Like, really? It’s the job of one guy, who happened to win a (kind of bullshit, because honestly, do you really believe for a minute that the electoral system is at all fair or open) election, to make the country profitable? There are things that the federal government can do, such as playing with the banking system, interest rates, passing laws and stuff, but those feel like tiny levers relative to how complex and human and vast the economy is. What about me? What about you? I feel like in many ways we’re better positioned to make a difference, because we don’t have to deal with all the political bullshit that politicians have to in order not to get kicked out of office.

* I’m a believer in creation rather than consumption. Consumption is nice. Consuming basic necessities, like housing, food, medical care to some degree, is critical for survival. Consuming other stuff makes life enjoyable. But at the end of the day, I think it’s things like human relationships, physical activity outdoors, and artistic self-expression that actually make people happy. Consumption can facilitate those activities to varying degrees, but it’s not the most important thing, and can just as easily get in the way by cramming our minds with stupid content and our bodies with unnecessary garbage.

* Given all that, I’m not a big believer in capitalism. The good thing about capitalism, which is why I’m not a believer in alternatives like socialism or communism, is that by giving people control over property, it gives people the freedom to take action without getting other people’s buy-in, which I think is very important… all creative advances, all the good things in life really, come from a small group of people who have ideas that don’t make sense to anyone but themselves until years later when everyone’s like “ohhhhh… that’s what you were doing, that’s awesome!” If you have to get the central bureaucracy to sign off on everything in advance, it becomes a shitty place to live. So capitalism is great in that it creates more freedom than any other form of human organization to date. But, that doesn’t mean it’s a stable system that creates a world where people aren’t systematically disempowered. I think most likely what we need is something new, something that hasn’t been fully tried before.

* There are some ideas floating around out there about what that new thing might look like. For instance, “reputation economies” or “gift economies”, where the idea is that everyone contributes as much as they can, and the reward for contributing is social rather than economic. It involves creating a bunch of norms around generosity, community, caring, etc. I don’t know if it works in practice or not. I’m definitely intrigued, though. The argument for why it hasn’t happened historically but could happen now is that a gift economy is an economy of abundance; it doesn’t work well for situations where there is resource scarcity, because it doesn’t adequately punish people who aren’t doing their part. But in a world where there’s enough to go around and we can survive having some freeloaders, and it’s okay to merely punish them by not inviting them to the cool parties, vs making them starve to death, then it might be stable. And it’s better at distribution than capitalism, because the people who end up in positions where they can produce a lot have incentives to share the wealth freely. And it’s better at distribution than various forms of taxation -> social programs schemes, because I think taking wealth from people at implicit gunpoint isn’t very socially healthy, especially when the people you’re taking it from probably correlate to some degree (and it is just some degree — but it’s also a non-negligable degree — and I feel like 90% of the political conflict with the occupy-wall-street vs wall-street thing comes down to bickering over how much of a degree it is, but let’s just agree that it’s somewhere between “none” and “completely”) with the people who’ve built the systems that create a lot of the wealth in the first place. I think everyone would be happier if people gave it away, if that was the social norm, as opposed to “let’s hire lawyers and do tax evasion!” which is kind of how it works today (well, sometimes it’s “let’s buy the federal government and rewrite the entire legal structure”, which works too).

* But just to emphasize the point again, I don’t know if this will work. I don’t think anyone knows what will work. A lot of people have very strong opinions about what should be done! But I tend to trust the people who have more questions than answers….

* I have a half-formed thought about the conflict between freedom and love. There’s something very freeing about the notion that you don’t have to do business with anyone you don’t want to do business with. That’s why capitalism is great for freedom. But on the other hand, there’s also something good about saying, “look, I’m stuck with these people, I gotta make it work!” That’s kind of the basis of family to some degree. I think the world situation is more like the latter, in that we’re all stuck on this ball of dirt in space, and we share the same air and land and natural resources. But there’s also an element to the former, in that it’s a really big ball of dirt, and we can move around, and I think there are very good things about the former that I don’t want to give up, even though I think there are also very good things about the latter. Again, this is kind of a half-formed thought….

So anyway. That’s kind of what’s on my mind about the economy right now. If I were to pick one take-away from the above mess, it would be: “don’t be a hater.” There are hard problems, and it’s confusing, but I feel like if we go in it with the attitude of taking responsibility, not blaming other people, and just enjoying the fact that we’re alive and get to worry about these kinds of things at all, it will all work out somehow. (Or not, and we all die in some kind of societal meltdown, but you know what, that’s okay too).

The difference between a fun-but-forgettable book and a great book is that a great book resolves some struggle in the author’s heart. It might not have a happy answer or an easy solution, but it takes a source of confusion and pain in the author’s world, and takes a stand about what it is or what it means.

Take The Great Gatsby for instance. Each character in the book arguably represents a different response to the crisis that F. Scott Fitzgerald saw in the world around him, namely that his contemporaries had lost faith in enlightenment values following World War I. He believed they were living empty lives of conspicuous consumption, hurting themselves and others. In writing The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald transformed that feeling from one man’s impression into a cultural truth, giving it iconic weight that continues to have force eighty-seven years later.

Tom Buchanan is a character in the book, a former star college football player who’s now rich, powerful, and morally lost. Fitzgerald writes, “Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.” Without rules, goal posts, and an opposing team, Tom doesn’t know what to do with himself. He acquires trophy horses, trophy cars, and a trophy wife, but he’s still dissatisfied.

The protagonist of the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels, by Bryan Lee O’Malley, is sort of a Tom Buchanan for our generation. He’s a hipster everyman, or at least, an every-man-child. Funded by his wealthy parents and roommate, he’s unemployed and spends his time sleeping, playing video games, and practicing with his indie rock band. Like Tom, Scott yearns for a remembered clarity of purpose, although in his case, it’s memories of playing games like Bomberman, Sonic the Hedgehog, or The Legend of Zelda.

Scott Pilgrim is about Scott’s quest to grow up, in a world that’s okay with him staying a child. It’s about what it means to be an adult in a post-modern society, one where relativism, self-reference, and irony have eroded faith in any kind of external standards or norms. I would argue that Scott Pilgrim is significant because it goes beyond post-modernism by asserting that there is an answer to “okay, so then what?” O’Malley takes a stand that even in our fractured, post-everything, been-there-done-that world, there’s still an “up” to grow into.
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Okay, here it is:

“I can be happy independent of my external circumstances.”

I think basically you can derive the main practical benefits of any form of organized spiritual system from this one concept. A few thoughts:

If you really believe this, your overall level of fear and stress will be pretty low, because it is hard to threaten you if you believe you can be happy in spite of bad things happening to you. Conversely, if you don’t believe this, things that are very distant from you such as a policy wonk making a gloomy economic forecast can seem like a direct personal threat.

On that note, I think a lot of religious teachings on generosity and compassion boil down to this in practice. If you feel secure, it’s easy to be generous even if you don’t have much, whereas if you feel insecure, it’s hard to be generous even if you’re rich. Happy people tend to make other people around them happy.

One of the cool things about this religion is that its truth is self-fulfilling. Believing it is a very happy thought, so the more you believe it, the more true it is. (And likewise, disbelieving it is a scary, threatening thought, so the more you disbelieve it, the less true it is).

I’m generally not okay believing in things that I don’t have good reason to think are true, but I think believing self-fulfilling truths is acceptable. Basically, I think you’re okay as long as you’re aware that you’re making a deliberate choice, and you acknowledge that someone who chooses the opposite isn’t wrong in any absolute sense.

As well as being theologically sound and personally liberating, I think this religion has useful practical consequences. I find that, paradoxically, being okay with not solving a problem makes it much easier to solve the problem. It gives you the freedom to step back and consider alternatives that you wouldn’t look at if you have a solve-it-or-die mentality. So although I suppose one could take the attitude that, because I’m happy regardless of external circumstances, I can let the world around me go to hell, I think if you choose to take a proactive, I want-to-make-the-world-a-better-place attitude, this religion helps rather than hinders you.

That said, I do think that when you start applying this thinking to the world around you, it changes your approach to things. It leads to more patient, incremental problem-solving, as opposed to sweeping, all-or-nothing efforts. It also leads to radically greater humility about your opinions, since in my experience a strong need to feel that you’re right is symptomatic of a fear of losing control. The real world is an incredibly complex place, far beyond our theoretical capacity to understand it, and that’s very scary if you’re not secure in your own happiness.

I’m not sure if this is a proselytizing religion. Can you imagine someone going door-to-door promoting it? Shouting it out on the street? Maybe some day. Maybe you!

Ack. I generally try to ignore trending news stories (more sanity for me!) but I got sucked in by this one. Short version: a question on an 8th grade reading comprehension test featured a silly children’s story accompanied by some dumb questions, the kids who took the test went “lol wut?”, and then the media had a field day bashing those responsible for the test.

Here’s the actual story / questions: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/20/nyregion/21pineapple-document.html

How many things are wrong with this picture?

Problem the first. The original version of the story that made it onto the interwebs was actually a loose (and creative) recap by one of the 8th graders: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/04/20/151044647/the-pineapple-and-the-hare-can-you-answer-two-bizarre-state-exam-questions. Apparently none of the reporters who covered it took the time to ascertain the validity of the transcription. Apparently even dialogue such as “Whoever makes it across the forest and back first wins a ninja! And a lifetime’s supply of toothpaste!” did not set off any editorial alarm bells. Thank you NPR.

Problem the second. It’s actually a great story! I admit I’m a little biased: the author of the story, Daniel Manus Pinkwater, was one of my favorite authors when I was a kid. The reason the story comes off as silly is because it comes from a genre that tends to cause problems for reporters and department of education employees alike. Let’s say it together: p-a-r-o-d-y. Specifically, the story subverts Aesop-style fables (such as “The Tortoise and the Hare”) by showing a cast of characters follow the typical genre logic down a silly path and ending up at odds with common sense.

While the story is good, the questions are not. Their author (some nameless employee in the bowels of some outsourced educational testing firm?) seems to have missed that this is not meant to be a work of psychological realism, and that therefore inquiries into the characters’ states of mind (were the animals annoyed or were they hungry?) are basically meaningless, as are guesses about counterfactual outcomes. The correct answer to the “which is the wisest animal” question is, in my opinion, “none of the above,” or maybe the rabbit, because he was all like “okay whatever let’s just race dude.”

So now the blogomediasphere is waxing outraged that our poor dear children are being subjected to, my gosh my god, silly and ambiguous questions, on this, the all important standardized test, that will determine their fates and the fates of their teachers forevermore!!!!

Okay. So clearly this is an incidence of incompetence on someone’s part. It’s a bad question. It might even be symptomatic of a broader swath of incompetence, although given the initial furor was based on some random 8th grader’s retelling of it, I’m inclined not to get too worked up on this evidence alone; we are clearly not dealing with a competent journalistic expose.

My feeling is that whether or not the question is competent is besides the point. The real thing to be sad about is that we have kids conditioned to look for the “right answer” and who freak out if they get tossed something ambiguous. Not the kids’ fault: they’re the ones being told that if they can’t pick from a multiple choice list correctly that they are “bad students” and won’t be able to get into college. The solution to this is not less ambiguous, more serious questions!! If anything, I think I’m glad this incident happened, because a bunch of kids learned the lesson that the adults with their “serious we are the education system” faces on aren’t always playing with a full deck; better they learn that in 8th grade then after they graduate from college!

You could teach a great lesson to a class of 8th graders for an hour with this story. You’d start by asking, “What’s the moral of this story?” and gradually elicit that what the story says is the moral (“Pineapples don’t have sleeves”) isn’t actually the moral, or at least, it’s a very coy statement of the actual moral. From there you could get into a discussion of what a fable is, what a parody is, what it means to be facetious, whether or not the author is just being silly or if there’s an actual point, common sense, etc. etc. Additionally, if you were teaching it to a class of kids who suffered through the test, you could have fun picking apart the questions that were asked about it, and maybe get into a bit of pedagogical theory about standardized tests, government bureaucracy, etc. Actually, that sounds like a not-too-bad college lesson plan!

An interesting thought occurred to me last night that I want to write down before it disappears.

I’ve always found the idea of setting goals problematic. It feels like something I “should” be doing, since there’s a lot of agreement that if you want things to happen for yourself, you need to have clear objectives. I never went so far as to subscribe to SMART (specific, measurable, actionable… I forget the rest), but I’ve sort of assumed that goal setting was part of a balanced productivity diet.

It’s never felt like a natural exercise for me, though. My problem with it is that it feels too sterile. Like, I have a mental image in my head about what I want the universe to look like, and I’m trying to make the world conform to that image. But one thing I’m sure of is that whatever I imagine, real life is infinitely richer and more complex, and trying to force the world to fit strips away the real-ness of reality and substitutes this artificial mental construct. The point of life is to get out of my head, after all.

Okay, well. So the thought that occurred to me was, rather than thinking of it as goal setting, think of it as question asking. For instance, instead of saying, “My goal is to get a 100 customers for my startup”, I could ask, “What would it look like for my startup to have 100 customers?” Rather than trying to force reality down a path, I’m open-mindedly asking a reality a question and seeing what comes up. There’s still an element of will, there — I’m choosing what question I’m interested in the answer to, after all — but it leaves it open to the possibility that the answer I get back looks totally different, such as, for instance, actually my startup shouldn’t have 100 customers, it should have 1 really really big customer. It’s a more collaborative approach to life.

Anyway this probably fits in the “DEEPEST EPIPHANY EVER -> Oh wait no it’s not” category, but it seems to unlock something I was personally a little stuck on, so I’m happy with it.

A few years ago I read David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon College commencement address, which talks about, among other things, assumptions hidden in plain sight. At the time it made an impression on me because it was passionate, wise, and came at a time where I was really confused about things and needed something to hold on to.

The other day I read a David Brooks editorial about what character traits make Presidents successful. I have no idea if I agree with the arguments but one characteristic jumped out at me: according to Brooks, great presidents have “an instrumental mentality. They do not feel the office is about them. They are just God’s temporary instrument in service of a larger cause.”

That comment reminded me of the Kenyon college address, because that’s exactly the kind of assumption hidden in plain sight that Wallace was talking about. To see yourself as a temporary instrument of God is a kind of basic assumption that colors your entire perspective of reality. Do I see myself as an instrument of some higher power? What do I see myself as?

It’s very cold outside right now. When I’m walking around, I generally want to get indoors as soon as possible, and I feel vaguely threatened by the whole situation, the fact that the environment I live in is actively conspiring to physically destroy me. I walk fast, and when someone gets in my way my default reaction is to feel like they’re an obstacle, a threat to my existence. It’s a seismic shift in perspective to turn around and see through some other lens.

I consider myself an atheist in the sense that I think it’s important not to believe things for social reasons. I think a lot (although not all) of “God” talk is people looking around and saying “well everyone else seems to think this is true, guess I should think it’s true too,” and therefore perpetuating a set of tribal creation myths down through the ages. However I think when I take that same skepticism and point it at the scientific, materialist view of reality, it feels just as unreal to me. The honest answer is that really I have no clue about the big questions — what is consciousness, why does the universe exist, how can clods of dirt feel like they have souls. It’s a blank, a blind spot, the eye trying to see itself.

When I try to feel an answer instead of think an answer, “God’s temporary instrument in service of a larger cause” feels right. “God” can’t be person — i.e. all the yucky ego individuality of someone with their desires and preferences and opinions — but what I do get is a feeling of a vast, unknowable creative energy trying to enter the universe, and the opportunity, if I’m able, to become an outlet of that energy, a point of intersection between its total abstract non-particularity and the living breathing stuff of life.

These are easier thoughts to have on cold days. On warmer days, there is this whole conventional universe that rises up. I almost can’t start describing it because it’s so omnipresent in every single thought I have that it’s impossible to sort out. But I can see it externally: for instance, the sitcom “How I met your mother.” The characters in that sitcom live in a safe, enclosed world, with predictable rules, certain given aspirations (find a life partner and settle down), a rotating collection of fixed scenery, and a shared set of values. I’m picking “How I met your mother” in particular because that little universe is fairly similar to the conventional universe that I happen to live in. Not identical, but close enough that it hits home. The amazing thing is how completely it saturates my mind, to the point where everything I perceive is interpreted through that lens.

Cold days remind me that there’s stuff that lays outside of all that. There are some basic facts of human existence, namely that we are frail, easily destroyed biological creatures living fixed lifespans and oftentimes in competition with reality and each other for the necessities of life, that are incompatible with the plots of “How I met your mother”. I also recently read this blog post about war, which is really sick and weird and points out exactly the same thing, that the reason people value war, that it’s so hard to stamp out the glorification of violence altogether, is that when you stack the realities of war up against conventional existence, even though it is worse because there is pain and loss, it’s intrinsically more compelling, because it can have the effect of breaking people’s lenses and letting them see the world with fresh eyes, even though the world they see with those fresh eyes is one of horrors.

Anyway I’m not sure exactly where I’m going with this. I had a taste earlier today of switching perspectives, of what it feels like for my individual pleasure and happiness not to be important and instead finding that being a vessel for greater creative forces to move through me is what’s important. I think I would like to be there more often. It’s hard and scary, though, because there’s such a tendency to revert, and because it’s infinitely more terrifying to live outside of convention. But also it’s so much more joyful and peaceful and happy to feel for a moment that really at the end of the day it doesn’t matter what happens to me, to feel flat words like love and compassion and kindness actually take on three dimensional weight when they are for once put in their proper context, which is that life is wild and dangerous and difficult and very very real.

Last night I dreamed I was having a conversation with a ghost. Just some random girl who I don’t know in waking-life. She was pretty hot, actually, which I found a little weird, even in the dream. I forget exactly why I was talking to her… I was on an assignment to do something, and she knew information I needed, but it turned out she was dead so I went over to where her body was decomposing and she showed up and we just started chatting about stuff.

I remember having the distinct thought at one point in the dream, “I don’t want to die.” It was a little-kid thought. The thought that I think everyone has at some point in their childhood when they get the memo that someday they will end up as a rotting pile of animal matter, when they try to wrestle with what it feels like to be dead. I remember as a kid trying to imagine what it would be like to not exist, and getting scared and frustrated because of the impossibility of imagining the absence of my own consciousness.

I’m not exactly sure why I’m thinking about all of this right now, but I think partly it’s because I’m reading The Book of Not Knowing which is by this Zen-inspired martial artist about seeing past all the false layers of the mind and having direct experience of our “true nature”. In other words, really questioning and not taking anything for granted and seeing what’s there.

I’ve read a number of people who argue that the basis of personality, the seat of the “ego”, is fear of non-existence. That most of everything we are most of the time is this vast unconscious edifice built up to insulate our minds from the realization we have as children that our entire universe, everything we can conceive of, will come to an end in a shockingly short period of time. In Donnie Darko, the message Donnie receives from the rabbit is that the world is ending in 48 hours. The world doesn’t end from our vantage point, but it does from his. Who says our perspective is the correct one?

One of the ways we deal with this disturbing fact at the center of our personalities is by telling stories about the future. Here’s mine: “Someday, if I do the right thing and work hard, everything will come together and I’ll have everything I ever wanted and I’ll be happy.” Kind of lame, actually… in the old days, most people’s stories were about eternal bliss in heaven, which is much more imaginative and ambitious (in my story, I still haven’t explained why I won’t die!)

Oh you can’t get to heaven
(Oh you can’t get to heaven)
With peanut brittle
(With peanut brittle)
Because the Lord’s own teeth
(The Lord’s own teeth)
Will break a little!
(Will break a little)
Oh you can’t get to heaven with peanut brittle because the Lord’s own teeth will break a little, I don’t wanna grieve the Lord no more!

The problem is that these stories have a dark core, because at least somewhere in my mind, I’m thinking, “what if it ain’t so? what if I work hard and then get hit by a car? What if I never get there?” This is why people don’t like atheists.

Anyway, this is the truth behind cliches like “live for the moment.” It’s not that it’s all fun and happy and dancing panda bears in the here-and-now, or that you won’t have to put up with the consequences of your compulsive <insert-vice-here> in the future, it’s that really, right now is all there is. Life is just a succession of right nows, right up until the last one. I dunno if this actually changes anything practically. I still have dreams, and I feel like as much as those dreams are about wish fulfillment, they’re also about doing what I love, pouring out all the talent and grace within me before they shut out the lights. In a sense it almost makes things more urgent. If you have a song to sing, better start singing it or you might not get a chance to sing the last note.

Prioritization, right?

Why do people like skiing?

I just got back from a ski trip. It was cold. We had to stick chemical warmers in our gloves and boots to keep our extremities from going numb. Ski boots chafe and bruise. Lift lines are long, and chairlifts are agonizingly slow when the wind is slowly eating the skin off your face.

I drove for five hours and paid exorbitant sums for lift tickets and overpriced resort food in order to have this experience. Whenever one of my friends suggests a ski trip, part of my gut groans, oh god, no, why this again?

Lugging the heavy gear around, impatiently waiting for my friends to catch up (or scrambling to fasten all my various clasps and straps while they waited impatiently for me), the only thing driving me forward was a burning impatience to get on the slopes, a mental voice chanting “let’s go let’s go let’s go.”

When you’re actually out there, it’s scary… there are people trying to collide with you, your skis vibrate and your too tight boots suddenly feel incredibly wobbly, the slope is always icy (on the east coast) and the run is always over too soon, just when you were really skiing it well it’s done, wait, I want to try one more mogul, but then it’s back on line again.

Even so, in those too brief moments there’s a sensation worth trekking out to the slopes for. It’s not adrenaline, which you can get much more cheaply, say by crossing the street in New York in front of a taxi. It’s freedom: the sensation of creating art against resistance. It’s the temporary full-on existential battle of your will against the environment, an experience that no longer exists in our sanitized child-proof homes and workplaces. It’s the reassertion of humanity, the statement that against the cold, the slope, the obstacles, the limits of your own body, you can learn to manipulate these forces and create a vision of your own design, yourself cutting graceful lines back and forth down the mountain.

Human minds are designed to take the chaos of our environment and create art. That’s what we do. At any and every moment where we aren’t being challenged by our environment in some way, we’re degrading from what we are. Most every day challenges are mental and social, because the physical world has become so utterly tamed. It’s kind of sad that we have to create artificial theme parks like ski resorts to briefly remember what being human with our full bodies, not just our minds, feels like. We’re victims of our own success, perversely paying for what our ancestors got for free.

Of course, we rarely actually die while skiing, so maybe we have the better deal?

One year ago on New Year’s eve I was home in California with my parents, my brother, and his girlfriend. Someone (probably my brother) made a joke about how I was the fifth wheel and how I should get a girlfriend too. I remember thinking, “you know what, screw this. I’m sick and tired of being alone. I’m going to celebrate New Year’s next year with a girl on my arm or else, damn it.” Or something to that extent.

Well, as of midnight two nights ago, I was alone, in my apartment, cleaning my room. Oops.

Yeah, so New Year’s resolutions don’t really work. They don’t really work at all. The reason they don’t work is that when you want something, and it’s as easy as telling yourself, “Okay, let’s do this now”, guess what, it’s probably already done. How many people need to make a resolution to eat a piece of chocolate cake that’s sitting right in front of them when they’re hungry?

The only time that resolving is actually useful is when a) you know exactly what actions you need to take, and b) the only thing in your way is inertia. This is actually the case reasonably often in life, but the kind of stuff that crops up around the resolving time of year only sometimes fits into that category. For instance, let’s take the perennial favorite, “lose weight”.

A) Most people don’t know what to do. They think, okay I should eat less and let’s try to run 30 minutes a day, but that won’t work well.

B) Even if that did work well, there’s more than inertia in the way: there’s time management (how do I get that thirty minutes a day?), impulse control (how do I make my future-self do what my present self is saying, instead of doing what it feels like in the moment?), and monitoring (how do I actually know I’m eating less? Am I being truly objective?), all of which are challenging problems that require some amount of skill to solve.

In my experience, most positive changes don’t come from applying more discipline or will-power. Rather, they come from new insights. For instance, for a long time I was telling people that I was writing a philosophy manifesto, and before that, for a long time I was dreaming about writing it. This year I actually finished it (it sucked, and I feel great because now all those ideas I had are out of my head so I can start thinking about new stuff). The thing that turned it from a pipe dream to an actual written document was the realization that the various barriers I kept running up against such as “I don’t know what to say next” or “I have writer’s block” or “I’m not in the mood to work on it” or “I’m not feeling inspired” were all rationalizations of an underlying fear of making it a reality, and that whenever I just forced myself to sit and type whatever I could think of, after thirty minutes of agony or so I actually started to make forward progress.

Resolving can be damaging, because if you resolve and then don’t succeed, it damages your trust in your ability to follow through, and reinforces the difficulty of the problem you’re trying to solve. So let’s resolve to stop resolving so much. As a substitute, my suggestion is reflecting. What went well last year? What went poorly? What would you do differently if you had to do it again? What lessons did you learn? If some resolutions naturally arise out of that, so be it… but no need to force them.

This year I stopped working on The Funscape, co-founded KeywordSmart, and then as of a few weeks ago quit KeywordSmart to start a new company. I made some new friends and ended some connections with old friends. I finished my manifesto. A lot went really right in all of that and a lot went really wrong. Some of my major takeaways:

• Cut losses fast. I spent too long in situations, both personal and work-related, that weren’t working for me. It’s hard to see it when you’re in it, because there’s good and bad to everything, but when you step back and ask big picture, is this really healthy, is this really what I want, is this flowing somewhere or is this stagnant water, and the answers are “no”, hit the eject button. This is a carry-over from last year, where I stayed at my hedge fund job longer than I should have, but this year it really hit home for me the degree of pain this causes. I feel literal physical grief for the fact I wasted years of my life sticking around in relationships that weren’t healthy. I don’t want to do that anymore.
   
• If you’re not passionate, it’s not worth it. KeywordSmart is a great company and I’m confident that it will continue onward to be successful. I left, though, because personally, it’s not life-or-death to me whether or not it succeeds. Up front, I didn’t think that level of deep commitment was necessary, but I’ve been learning that any tough challenge that you can’t fully compartmentalize as a “day job” is only worth it if you really, really want it. I ran into this problem last year too, at my hedge fund job: it wasn’t just a job to me, but it also wasn’t something I deeply cared about. That’s an awful space to be in. I don’t think there’s anything wrong in being purely mercenary: you go in, you give a defined amount of effort to the best of your abilities and with pride in your work, you collect your paycheck, and you peace out. But if the goals are at all ambiguous, if you’re responsible for bringing something new into the world, then that’s not a day job and unless you have a motivator for doing it that comes from somewhere very deep inside of you, it’s not going to be worth it.
   
• Just sit down and do the work. See above re: my manifesto.
   
• Connect with humans. I spent too much time this year making friends with the characters in my favorite TV shows and not enough time making friends with the ones walking around in real life. This came home to me a few days ago when some of my good friends were just hanging around talking and I realized how much external perspective I was missing out on, how much bigger the world is than it exists in my own imagination, and how the only way that I can access that bigger world is by interacting with other people who will show it to me.
   
• Create space. This one is tentative, it’s my theory on what I need to do so that next New Year’s, I do actually have a relationship. It’s the Bruce Lee “empty your cup” thing; you can’t get something new without getting rid of the old stuff you’re hanging onto. Two nights ago I cleared a lot of stuff off my bookshelf, various books and mementos. I still like / care about a lot of them, but I decided it was time to put them aside, shelve them as a memory, and clear up the space for new things to happen. Emotionally, dating and connecting with people requires a lot of compassion and a lot of willingness to experience new things. The only way of having that is to take all the old emotions, all the sadness I feel, all the anger, all the reasons and stories and stuff I’ve clung onto, and let go of it. I don’t want to start dating someone right now, was my realization. I still have too much clearing-out work to do.

That’s the other problem with New Year’s resolutions: if you don’t pay enough attention to where you’re really at, sometimes you set the wrong goals. It feels a lot better to set the right goals, and that only comes from listening rather than speaking, not resolving but reflecting.