Hey, Go Easy on Yourself in 2024
While the rest of you return to your lives today (Tuesday), I return to jury duty. What an intriguing liminal space.
So, there's a book about Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments written by a finance guy -- I won't name it, it's not worth your time -- that does an decent overall survey of Smith's book on morality and ethics.
Sidebar: quite a few of you have read/heard me say this, but you can't really get Wealth of Nations without reading Theory of Moral Sentiments first. Sentiments is basically "How do we define what a good person is, and what are the boundaries of empathy?", followed by Wealth which is "Hey, look at this new thing, capitalism. Remember when we talked about good people? Don't put this in the hands of bad people, because this thing will blow your fucking face off."
Followed by Marx, close to a hundred years later, writing "Man, look, we blew our faces off. What the fuck?"
Right, back to this book. It's pretty harmless, tooling along on the premise that we can learn a lot from Smith's thoughts on morality, when it hits what Smith writes about "Men of the System" -- the idea that trying to impose order from the top down would fail, that trust and empathy between individuals was the key to successful society ...
... at which point the book swung into one of the most cold-blooded libertarian turns I've ever witnessed. Sociopathy spread on a heaping slice of ambition. Because this writer took this idea to mean any attempts to mitigate social ills by greater social effort rather than leaving it to individuals was not just morally wrong, it was oppression. Everyone who tries to make life better through government is a Man of the System, by which we mean Stalin.
Libertarians. Always the virgin Rand, never the chad Nozick.
So the reason I bring this up is because this writer, being a finance bro, only sees one type of system as bad. And kind of misses the point of the bit: Smith was writing that the Man of the System was dangerous not just because he believed he could order society and people would simply comply, but because these Men were confident that they knew more than they were capable of knowing -- and if that doesn't describe our current Techbro Oligarchy then jam me in an amateur submarine and call me Oh God What Was That Noise.
One system he misses (there are plenty) I'd like to tag is Hustle Culture. One of the downsides of my interest in note-taking programs and language learning and productivity (I'm just looking for pen recommendations!) is that it's all very Hustle Culture adjacent. Which note-taking program will MAXIMIZE YOUR STUDY TIME?! One of the weirdest aspects of this is the Philosophy Bro culture, particularly on YouTube, with videos like "STOICISM to BECOME UNDEFEATABLE". That is not what philosophy is for, my intense vlogging buddy.
There's this pernicious belief, this little brainworm, that there's some perfect habit, or set of habits, out there to bring success. There is a System, the right System for a Right Life. Living in a world where the threat of artificial scarcity is used as a cudgel to force you to buy into the system that profits off artificial scarcity doesn't help, of course. But so many of us internalize that voice. Some of us internalized it years ago, from parents or teachers, or culture at large, craving at least approval if success itself becomes elusive. Sometimes if we lack a clear example of that voice, we assume the role ourselves. Constantly disappointing that other version of ourselves riding shotgun in our brain. Why aren't we writing more, doing more? Jesus, that kid on YouTube who builds databases in Notion is both a doctor and a life coach and he wrote a book!
We obliterate our individuality in service to a system we believe will maximize it.
My point here is -- you know, I'm actually going to use Stoicism. Because one of my favorite quotes from the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius in Meditations is this:
"At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I'm going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”
Now, Meditations is not outwardly directed. It wasn't a book of advice, it was his a collection of notes to himself about how to think and live. So this guy, this Emperor who is held up as a paragon of virtue, who led his troops in the Germanic Wars, governed during a pandemic, famous reformer, some morning Marcus Aurelius was like:
"Fuck, man, I cannot get out of bed this morning. Come on, get up. Get up. Get uuuup, Marcus. I just want to huddle under the blankets. Fuuuuck. This is soooo comfy. I need to write myself a pep talk for the next time this happens."
What I find inspiring, I'm sure you've deduced, is not the pep talk itself. It's that one of the hardest, smartest, most powerful guys on the planet at the time, felt he had to write that pep talk, to help him to stop hiding under the covers on the days when he was a soft boi for whom It Was All Too Much.
My point is, for 2024, I hope you are not going forward with "This Is The Year We Smash It!" energy. I think "This is the Year We are Going To Have 52 Good, Perhaps Adequate, Certainly Not Great, Weeks If We Are Very Lucky" energy will do just fine. Set reasonable goals -- no, set low bars, unbelievably low bars and hit them. Rack up cheap wins. Experiment. Fail twice to succeed once. Three wins a week, and one of them can certainly be "put up a shelf."
I don't use the word "energy" in a woo-woo sense, either. I remember from my hard won physics degree (no, fuck you, Nonlinear Differential Equations) the meaning of energy in its classic definition: "The capacity to do work or produce heat." There is Idealized Us, and there is Real Us, and maybe we should start being a bit more reasonable about how much work and heat Real Us is capable of creating in this upcoming pig-fuck of a year. Hustle Culture, even the base version of American Culture a lot of us absorbed, argues we can do more and more work through sheer force of will and discipline. But work comes from energy, and energy is neither created nor destroyed. It'll come from somewhere.
I suppose this is my roundabout way of saying I'm worried about all of you, that the world is going to be very cruel to us this year, and there's no need to help it be that way. I know some of you are wired for ambition, and if so, good on ya. Just remember to always check that voice driving you, and make sure it's yours.
Reviews and Recommendations
Session 9 (2001)
This is a twenty-three year old horror movie about a work crew of guys stripping asbestos out of an abandoned mental institution. One of the first films shot on digital, Brad Anderson does something interesting with that -- digital handled low light like shit back then. He uses the artifacting. As characters peer into the pixelated dark, wondering if something's there, we're leaning forward too, because goddam it we can't quite make out a shape because the film's reality is too low-res. Not too dark, too low-res. Shapes don't loom from shadow into light like THE CONJURING films, they manifest. A lovely, sad slow burn, give it the time and attention it deserves, preferably in a dark room.
The Thursday Murder Club Books
These are mainstream cozies by British comedian and panel-show guest -- that's a viable job in the UK -- Richard Osman. A group of senior citizens in a retirement community solve murders. Are the plots predictable? Well, let's say they hew to the tropes. But his command of language is delightful, I yelped with outrage at the first bit of writing in the first book, just furious at how clever it was. The characters are sheer comfort food. A found family feast.
But what sets the books apart is that these senior citizens are not tooling along in some idealized space. They are old, in ways that I can relate to as I climb through my fifties. They have lost loved ones. Their kids are distant, struggling not to become strangers. They build an artifice of pleasant memories but are well-lived enough to know it's an artifice, stripping the construct of much of its comfort. There are flashes of heart-stopping sadness in all the books, but the most recent one, The Last Devil to Die, grabs you by the collar and forces you to look straight at the worst time in one character's life. A time many of us will have to confront, ourselves, inevitably.
I was explaining to someone the other day that as light as LEVERAGE is, I always feel it really runs on rage and sadness. These books are in the same vein.
All of Us Strangers (2023)
Andrew Scott is a screenwriter living in a surreally empty London apartment building, writing about his difficult childhood. Paul Mescal is his improbably beautiful neighbor. Scott goes to visit his childhood home. Magical realism occurs. I'm not going to spoil it. Just know that I cried for the last half hour of this movie. THE LAST HALF HOUR STRAIGHT. I had to sit with my head between my knees for five minutes after the lights came up. If beautiful sad-eyed emotionally vulnerable Irish men dealing with trauma is your jam, this is the uncut shit, it is the real deal. Approach with caution.
Rolling Dice With Advantage
And now the change-up for the tabletop roleplayers among you. RPG's are story genre simulation systems that use dice to randomize story moments. One of the mechanics many of them use is the reroll -- something about your character or the situation allows you to pick up the die and roll again, hoping for a higher, and so more fortuitous, result. But what actual advantage does that grant, mechanically? How much of a statistical bonus do you get from the reroll?
Matt Parker of Stand-Up Maths takes a delightful half hour to explain, by gluing physical dice together to represent the probability matrices, how the math falls out. There are maybe ten of you who will love this video as much as I did, but hey, what else is the goddam internet for?
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Hydration, square breathing, blankets, these are our shields against the storm. See you next week.