Totally Over-Thinking It
One of the omnipresent features of earthly life that completely mystifies me is entitlement. It's such a simple idea, yet it showers strange behavior that can only be focused through this lens. People deserve . Or so it seems. I have to take it on faith, because I don't. Normally, I can empathize with the intentions behind bad behavior, having managed a million people for a decade, acquiring a…
I've revised and improved this posting from 2023. I've had the impression since childhood that the universe is trying to teach me things. In fact, that's what This All is. Especially the friction; the "bad" stuff. I'm not trying to shine some positive light on it - Mr. Optimist constructively framing the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. It's not a "spin". For me, it's a fully-formed point…
There is a level of stupidity that only smart people can attain. Extraordinary skill and mental firepower are needed to reach the absolute peak of stupidity. Marx. Ayn Rand. Eugenics. Radical Chic. Universal basic income . Mortgage-backed securities. Lobotomy. Nation-building. Segways. Technical stock analysis. Citizens United. Clippy. "Move fast and break things". Etc.
The problem with making an edge case of yourself (in any respect) is that it becomes painfully obvious when people lapse into framing specific "You" as a generalized "Them." People very often are not interacting with a specific you. You dissolve for them into a category. This is perfectly normal, and usually unnoticed by either party. It happens most commonly out of laziness. It takes special…
In a recent posting titled "Sharpening" , I wrote: Many people can guess the current time to the minute whenever they pop awake in the middle of the night. It feels like a superpower, but it's not. Whenever a cashier adds you up, flash a total. Don't calculate. Don't try to be right. Just quietly flash a number, with zero effort. Pretty soon you'll get super good at it. Whenever you check…
How far away is another frame? Impossibly far yet immediately accessible. It sounds like a trippy puzzle, but there's nothing spooky about it. It's a simple matter of shifting perspective. How far away is forgiveness? Impossibly far, but you can do it right here and right now. It's immediately accessible. Just reframe! How far away is gratitude? Impossibly far yet immediately accessible. Just…
A strange form of behavior is becoming more and more common. I've coined the term "recircumcision," which hopefully evokes a baby peering up from his crib in horror asking "Really? You're seriously going to cut me again ? The recircumcision phenomenon is best seen by examples: Outdoing Your Self-Deprecation You say something self-deprecating, and the other person one-ups you. You: "I'm a screwup"…
The problem with intuition is that it can be hard to distinguish useful intimations from suggestions of what you want to happen, or are afraid might happen. Or from random frothy mental noise. It's hard to winnow truth from slop. I've written previously ( "The Subtlety of Truth" ) that real intuition is quiet and doesn't nag, whereas emotion and froth holler on endless repeat. "God whispers while…
Mocking old people is like booby trapping the rollercoaster you're queued to ride.
My whole life, I've worked into a headwind because of my looks. It's not that I'm particularly horrible looking, but more than one woman has informed me that I'm not in "their league" (actually true, though not in the way they thought), and when I walk into a room of strangers, the energy, despite my upbeat attitude and witty repartee, sinks measurably. Ah, hell. Here comes Mr. Shloomphy. The…
Many people can guess the current time to the minute whenever they pop awake in the middle of the night. It feels like a superpower, but it's not. Whenever a cashier adds you up, flash a total. Don't calculate. Don't try to be right. Just quietly flash a number, with zero effort. Pretty soon you'll get super good at it. Whenever you check anything, flash a result. Nothing obsessive or emotionally…
Last week I presented my ludicrously long list of ailments. I've been coping with them far better than I'd expected, and feeling pretty healthy, having baked a little limping, a little pain, and a little vigilance into my expectations. I've accepted a few limitations while happily doing the myriad things I can still do. Since medical issues have been flowing at wholesale levels, I've developed a…
Everyone’s trying to understand Trump’s mysterious bond with Putin. There may indeed be kompromat, but I propose that the following is equally significant: Trump lived in a realm of comparatively modest transgression. Petty extortion, fraud, sexual coercion. As a psychopath, he was always capable of far worse, but in his world, deeper evil wasn’t part of his in-game experience. By thinking too…
As a child, I once mistakenly pressed the "B" button in the elevator in my grandparent's Miami Beach apartment building, and found myself intruding on the custodial staff at lunch time. There was an absolutely revolting smell I couldn't identify. It felt like a violent attack (if you told me it was mustard gas, I'd have believed you). I mashed the "door close" button, desperately trying to escape.…
Behold the Hovering Sky Baby Medical specialists — pediatricians and proctologists — probably believe themselves to occupy a higher plane than general physicians. Their extra training feels like a badge of specialness. They're the specialest! We cling to what makes us feel special and ignore the rest. And it's that second part that I'd like to discuss. In the long arc of their education, an…
I am an old hand at not being on TV. There are more of us than you'd imagine. Let's survey the whole field from top down, from the perspective of someone who was actually a prospect. At any given moment a handful of hit TV shows make lots of money. So much money that they shower down nourishment for the entire TV ecosystem. There are also a few dozen (I'm making up numbers, but the gist is…
One can't deny an assertion without a reasonable understanding of what's been asserted. To deny an assertion because "it sounds wrong" would be sheer intellectual arrogance, no? "It's wrong because it doesn't pass my smell test — and I am the smeller-in-chief!" Are you quite sure you understand what people are talking about when they use the term, "God"? I've previously suggested that your style…
Sometimes I'm fast-smart and sometimes I'm slow-smart (the rest is an uninteresting morass of confused incompetence). The fast-smart part is talent. I can't really account for it. The slow-smart part — the larger part — is, paradoxically, where I do my best work. Slow-smart really means stupid-but-tenacious. It's a much better faculty, though very few people discover this (I'll explain why in a…
Some people can't be in pain or inebriated without being mean to others. Their kindness is a fragile facade that shatters under duress. Others aren't like this. They may grow less coherent and be less heedful of courtesies. But their deep-seated kindness remains intact, come what may. I dislike flat umbrella terms like "good" and "evil". But however you might care to define those terms, this seems…
"Every one of us is a survivor of multiple encounters with the Unthinkable" Why does that read fresh and surprising? Why does it jolt us into shifting perspective (aka reframing)? Because we don't normally consider it. We're blind, subconscious, essentially asleep to this. Per dream logic, we perpetually find ourselves caught, Groundhog Day-style, in a fraught game where we MUST NOT TOUCH THE…
A musician recently died, and there is testimonial after testimonial about how he was the kindest, most wonderful person. I've read a number of books about spies. Their trade secret is homework. Every action that seems to go right with a mere shrug is made possible by unimaginable hours of unseen preparation, backup preparation, and backup-backup preparation. A spy's edge over the rest of us is…
Every single person I've ever met is dumbfounded by the enormous irrationality of other people....even as they themselves are obviously irrational much of the time. It stems from each of us feeling robustly capable from our experience operating in some narrow realm with clarity and competence. We feel comfortable forgiving our failings outside that realm. An otherwise competent person is naturally…
Choosing oranges is easy. Heavy = good, light = bad. Heavy is juicy. Light is dry. Water weighs more than dry pulp. Duh! Yet I’ve never seen anyone perform this check. They poke, inspect, admire color, avoid blemishes, compare shapes. Even in Portugal, where oranges are everywhere, I watch shoppers deplete the various bins evenly, even if one contains noticeably heavier fruit. How can anything so…
Truly competent people embrace challenge and correction. They never assume they've got the best or the only solution, and this makes them good managers and leaders. Incompetent people despise challenge or correction. Whatever solution pops into their head is instantly canonized. It's not just stubborn vanity and over-self-confidence. They’ve mistaken the performance of leadership for leadership…
Bob Dylan squeezed gobs of mileage out of his poetic license. He was so palpably gleeful to let listeners Rorschach his lyrics that he could come off like Exhibit A of the old slogan "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit." But I must concede that some of his thin, vague images — like "the answer blowing in the wind" — do stick with a person. Useful framings are made…