Blogging Is A Good Habit

Because I have comments enabled on my blog, and because no one actually communicates with each other as real people anymore, I occasionally receive emails notifying me that a spam bot has left a comment on my blog. I don't bother to delete these comments because, who knows, perhaps they somehow drive traffic to me on their way to driving traffic to whatever it is they're selling. (I have no idea what they're selling, because I don't click the links in their comments.)

Against my better judgement, I do still read all the comments I get here, so feel free to post one any time you're moved to communicate to a real person. I'm here, I'm paying attention. It seems crazy, I know, but it's true. 

I take that back. It doesn't seem crazy, it seems antiquated. Remember back at the Turn of the Century, when people wrote blog posts and others commented? Remember when communication was still relatively fun, still something people looked for opportunities to do? Remember when social media wasn't always some combination of broken and infuriating? Or do things just seem better in hindsight.

Anyway, when I receive these spam-bot comments, I sometimes click through to the old blog post upon which they appear and re-read what I wrote. It's a trip down memory lane. Sometimes I've written about something that was going on in my life; sometimes it's just a thought I had; sometimes it's a diatribe. In short, it's a collection of thoughts I really had on real days of my life that I really decided to write about. Reading it back again is actually quite nice. I seldom read a post and think to myself, "Oh God, I was such an asshole/idiot/whatever." It's encouraging to know that the things I spent some time thinking about in the past produced good thoughts that I generally still agree with. 

I'd say I've never kept a journal, but I suppose this is it. I've finally discovered what generations of my forefathers had known: journalling is a worthwhile activity. Indeed, blogging is a good habit. 

Over the years, I've fallen out of practice. Immersed in a daily commitment to blogging can be a little stressful, especially as it was in the early days, when people actually read my blog and responded. I felt a responsibility to write to my audience and provide them with something worth reading. But stress wasn't the only reason I stopped blogging. Like many other former bloggers, I sometimes had the sense that there wasn't any point, that I had "said it all before" and didn't want to repeat myself. And of course, all the other bloggers who actually made money doing this moved on to Medium and then to Substack and now, I can't believe it, people pay a monthly subscription to read stuff like this. And then they use AI graphics and post their stuff on X and it's this whole marketing thing for them. 

When I go back and read someone else's blog, I seldom feel as good about their old blog posts as I feel about mine. That's not a criticism; there's nothing wrong with their posts. I think it speaks to their motivation and authenticity, though. David Henderson's blog never gets old. He writes authentically. But Slate Star Codex guy's posts are stale within a week of having been written. Clearly these two example bloggers are writing different kinds of posts for different reasons.

And then there's me, writing for a third reason, which is mostly that I just like it. There are other potential benefits, such as having a record of my personality for posterity, assuming this blog doesn't end up getting deleted at some point. Writing advice to my kids for when they need to read it and I'm not there to say it to them. I've written about all that before.

Well, anyway, I hope I re-develop the blogging habit. It's good. It's productive for me. I think I'll try to keep it going. 

In closing, I'd like to set down a list of things that have happened to me that readers of this blog may not have been aware of, given that I've been quite out of touch for a while. Here it is:

• My band released an album. Listen to it here and elsewhere.
• I converted to Orthodox Christianity. Long story. Maybe I'll write about it some time.
• I started learning Greek - not really related to the Orthodox thing, but kind of.
• I'm still running and riding bikes like a fiend, so that's not really an update.
• For some reason, I can't think of anything else right now. I'll blog about things as I go.

Anyway, here's hoping I can reestablish this great habit.

My Daily Bread

A short while ago, I grew tired of paying in excess of four dollars for a loaf of bread that no one in my household actually enjoyed eating. My wife gave up eating all but the seediest, crumbliest multigrain bread on the shelf, but I was unable to eat that for blood sugar control reasons. Meanwhile, my children enjoyed only the sweetest, most cake-like white bread, and even then would refuse to eat the crusts. You can likewise imagine what impact that bread had on my blood sugar. The bread that did work for me tasted... fine. When I first discovered it, it was about $2.50 per loaf (even then, expensive by my standards), but the price has increased quite a bit over the years.

All this adds up to: bread was a problem at my house. It was expensive, and it didn't taste good. Some people in my position would just give up eating bread at all. I took a different tack: I decided to buy the fanciest, most expensive bread machine I could find and commit to baking my own bread at home.

As I've tried to explain, this was a decision made out of necessity. Baking, and cooking in general, gives me no great pleasure. I don't hate it, but I consider it the same as any other chore I would rather do than not do: I'm glad to do it, but it doesn't make me happy.

Thus, my needs as a home-baked-bread man were as follows: I need the bread to be cheap, good-tasting, easy to make, requiring no great thought, finesse, or strategy on my end for baking it, and I would like it to be consistent. 

After baking a number of the standard recipes that came with the bread machine, I settled into a white bread loaf that met my needs. I have adjusted the recipe to improve its taste more to my liking: not so sweet, and a fair bit saltier. Now, I don't buy bread at the store anymore at all. I bake it exclusively at home.

Here's what I've learned and how I've benefited from this change:

First, I now spend less than half as much money to get a loaf of bread about twice as large. That's a win for home economics.

Second, my bread has no preservatives. It's made only of water, wheat, sugar, salt, butter, milk, and yeast. This matters a lot more to my wife, who has developed a bit of a fear of chemicals. Even so, the bread I bake lasts long enough for us to eat it, so the preservatives aren't necessary.

Third, and possibly as a result of the above, the bread tastes a lot better. It tastes normal, as bread should taste. It tastes so much better than my kids now prefer to eat a slice of bread for a snack to some of the other snack food garbage kids tend to develop a taste for. And they eat the bread crusts; even the heels! My wife happily eats the bread I bake, and she had all but given up eating bread at all. And, of course, it tastes better to me, personally, because I've adjusted the recipe to match my own flavor preferences.

Fourth, it works with my blood sugar. It is admittedly not quite as good on that level as the other bread I was eating, but it's viable. 

Finally, it is incredibly easy to bake - I don't have to think about it, or knead it, or jump through special hoops and techniques to get it to come out correctly. I don't have to add seven thousand special ingredients to make it better in one way or another. It is almost thoughtless. I just add the ingredients to the machine, and in about three hours' time, I have a perfectly baked loaf of bread with great texture.

So, I achieved all my goals and solved my household's "bread problem." I recommend this solution to any of my readers who can afford an expensive bread machine and who have similar issues with store-bought bread. 

Another Small Benefit To Having A Routine

I've surely written before about the many benefits of having a consistent, daily routine. If I had to sum up all the benefits concisely, I'd put it this way: A daily routine helps to "automate" certain thought processes, which allows you to get things done without necessarily having to dedicate space for them in your thoughts.

Having to remember to take your medication, for example, is wasted mental effort if you can replace the "need to remember" with the muscle memory of taking your medicine as part of your daily breakfast. You don't have to "remember" how to make a bowl of cereal; so if taking your medicine is something you do right before you pour cereal into your bowl, then it just becomes part of the "cereal process" (no pun intended) and you don't have to think a separate set of thoughts about "I have to take my medicine."

Over time, I've "automated" my daily water consumption in a very similar way. Each morning, I make myself a cup of green tea to have with my breakfast. After I eat, as a final "breakfast step," I drink a large glass of water while I take my supplements (milk thistle, nicotinamide riboside, glucosamine, CoQ10, and a daily multivitamin). Within the hour, I prepare a cup of chamomile tea to drink while I work. At the same time every morning, I have a work meeting, and right before my work meeting, I either fill up a bottle of water to drink during the meeting, or I open a bottle of Topo Chico mineral water. By 10 or 10:30 AM, I remind myself that my midday workout is coming up, so I have another glass of water. With that, I've typically had 40-80 ounces of fluid before noon.

My post-workout routine also usually involves another 32 ounces of water, followed by two 12-ounce glasses of water at lunch. By the early afternoon, I have typically had twelve or more glasses of water. That makes sense for a guy who works out a lot and who eats plenty of electrolyte-rich foods. In fact, some days, I could stand to drink a bit more.

But the point is, all of this hydrating is built into my normal daily routine, so that I can get all the fluid I need without having to think much about it. The only time I really consciously think about hydrating is when I remember to drink a glass of water before my workout. All the rest of it is thoughtless habit.

There is a downside to this. Life isn't perfect, nor is it entirely consistent from day-to-day. So, by building something important like hydration into my daily routine, it means that if my routine is ever disrupted, even for simple reasons like a doctor's appointment or a one-off business meeting, my hydration suffers for it. Not only does that make it a greater challenge to stay hydrated during inevitable disruptions, it also makes the common irregularities of life, like a rescheduled meeting, more of an annoyance than they need to be.

What Makes A Good Blog?

Prologue

Blogging is, for all intents and purposes, dead. Nobody reads blogs anymore, unless those blogs have been designed in such a way as to create the appearance of a major publication. No, I'm not naming names.

Still, a few of us still enjoy reading blogs. I know I do. When I encounter a blog I haven't seen before, I generally have one of two reactions. One reaction is that I become absolutely absorbed in the blog content and read as many posts in quick succession as I possibly can. The other reaction I tend to have is that, as I start to read one blog post, my eyes start to glaze over, I skim the rest of the post, quickly skim the other posts in search of content that doesn't make my eyes glaze over, fail to find it, and then move on to other things.

So, my reaction to blogs is that I either find them really interesting, or they just plain suck.

My own blog probably falls into the latter category. I can't imagine a single reason why someone who wasn't me or a Russian ad-bot would want to read my blog. That's perfectly fine; I only blog for myself, anyway. It's safe to say, then, that I have cultivated a terrific expertise in blogs that just plain suck.

What about the good ones? What makes them so great? Here's a list of attributes that I think make blogs good. This is my list of attributes; yours might be different. Feel free to provide your list in the comments (ha ha, nobody reads my blog).

• Good blogs deal in interesting subject matter. Content really is king. I'll forgive a poorly designed, or even a poorly written, blog if I'm interested in the subject matter. I'l forgive a lot of things. But if the blog is just like... autobiographical yammering (hmm, kinda like mine...) then I won't spend much time reading it.
• Good blog posts tend to be well-written. George Selgin recently wrote a blog post on the history of an obscure rule governing the Federal Reserve's board of governors. I'm as big an economics nerd as anyone, and even I think that's dull subject matter. But the thing of it is, Selgin is such a wonderful writer that he can make anything absolutely fascinating; and so he does with this post. Someone who writes that well can write on virtually any topic and keep the reader engaged. 
• Good blog posts tend to be concise. There is a time and a place for long-form writing, and some of my favorite blog posts have been quite long. But when I discover a new blog for the first time, I tend to look for short posts whose quality can be easily assessed. It's easier to follow a blog when following it doesn't involve a major investment of time or reading effort.
• Good blogs tend to have an active comments section. I don't know how to curate this sort of thing, but it can make even a dull blog a lot more fun.

Considering the above, I can think of one blogger who excels on all fronts: Bryan Caplan. I think he might be the best blogger in the virtual-reality-space-that-was-formerly-known-as-the-blogosphere. We bloggers should all aspire to be more like him.

Epilogue

I'm going to make a bit of a blog pivot again. I'm going to pivot away from strongly autobiographical material -- there isn't much going on in my life that would be interesting to readers, anyway -- and toward honing my writing skills. I'll take a two-pronged approach. 

The first prong will be developing more concise, reader-friendly blog posts like the ones I've just described. You know, be a better blogger. 

The second prong will be developing my own, unique writing voice. I have some book ideas I'd like to work on. I won't use the blog to publish those book ideas, but I will use it as a way to find my voice. Those blog posts will likely be a bit longer.

A Writer

I've maintained a blog for nearly nine years. I've contributed posts to other people's blogs many times throughout that timespan. I've written some more formal articles for online publication. Professionally, I've written a number of formal pieces, published within industry. I've contributed to academic articles. I've written lyrics and rhymes my whole life. And, occasionally, I write short stories. Considering all that, I suppose I can fairly make the claim that I am a writer.

I don't claim that everything I write is good, nor do I claim that I am a professional. Given the sheer volume of words I have committed to some form of publication, however, there is simply no getting around it. I am a writer.

Larissa MacFarquhar is also a writer. I recently read the transcript of a conversation she had with Tyler Cowen, and it got me thinking. Throughout the interview, she interjects small details of her own beliefs about what constitutes great writing. It's clear that she loves the small nuances contained in the way individuals choose to phrase things. It's clear she's drawn to prose, but not from the standpoint of seeking the ideal way of expressing a thing. Rather, MacFarquhar seems attracted to a person's communicative individuality. That's a strong asset for a person who profiles other people for a living, as she does. It's clear, or at least plausible, that she has risen to her level of career success in part from having an asset like that.

A fixation on the way written prose is constructed, an attention to detail with respect to the poetry of the act of writing, is something I have noticed that many writers have. Being wordsmiths themselves, they seem to delight in the act of wordsmithing, almost as a spectator sport. They can find the uniqueness of the way that somebody did it, and analyze it carefully until it is much more than less attentive people would ever have known. This strikes me as being very natural and normal. Of course it would be so.

Yet, this is an attribute I have never shared with other writers. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the linguistic acrobatics of James Joyce and the sublime perfection of Herman Melville's prose. Anyone could love that. I, however, don't tend to notice lesser prose. If you gave me five generic magazine writers and asked me to rank-order the quality of their prose, I'd be able to do it, but I'd be splitting hairs. Unless I see a Shakespeare or a Melville, I don't tend to notice the distinctness of a writer's prose.

Nor do I have any such obsession about my own writing. Over the past year, I have been slightly more diligent about the way my sentences are constructed. I second-guess my use of passive voice more often now than before, although I give myself greater license to use it. I make a point of avoiding repetitious vocabulary. I'll rearrange my adjectives and adverbs until they bounce a little more lightly on the tongue. This is all in service of trying to avoid sounding like a technical manual when I write. I want my written sentences to approximate the lightness of the thoughts than inspired them; even if I never reach it, I think it's important to try. I may not really have any readers other than ye Russian bots, but if someone accidentally happens upon one of my blog posts, I'd prefer they enjoyed their accident.

But, I repeat, this does not come from a place of prose-obsession. I am not hunting for the world's greatest metaphor or patting myself on the back for writing seven consecutive sentences in which all the adjectives trace their etymological roots to Sanskrit. Conceptually, that would be kind of cool, but it's just not my bag.

So, I lack an obsession I've noticed that many successful writers have. I am not particularly interested in an aspect of writing that appears highly correlated to commercial success as a writer. Were I to form a Bayesian prior about that fact, it would be that this makes me unlikely to ever be a successful writer. On the other hand, it's not clear to me at all that successful writers are those who possess this obsession. What about Dan Brown, for example? His prose isn't particularly swell -- in fact, I don't happen to like it at all -- and yet he is one of the most successful writers of my lifetime. And no one read Fifty Shades of Grey for its deft use of iambic pentameter. Those writers who are capable of tapping into the fiction market zeitgeist may not need to be great writers from a mere technical standpoint. Maybe they just need to have a good story to tell.

It's hard to definitely say what makes a writer good. Given that writing is an art, perhaps "good writing" just means there is something in it that speaks to the reader on a personal level. Good writing may in fact be the opposite of blog writing; blog writing happens when a writer writes about something the speakers to the writer on a personal level, and hopes that the reader finds a sentence or two to quote and hyperlink-to.

I don't know if I'm a good writer or a bad one, and it might not be for me to say. But I do know that I'm a writer, I've been writing, and I'm trying to polish that ability a little bit in hopes of having something to say in the future. We shall see.

Drifting Apart

I don't know a lot about Dungeons & Dragons, having only "played" (is that the right word?) once or twice in my life. I never really took to it, as I never understood whether what I was doing was supposed to be pretending I was a knight and running around with a toy sword, or sitting down with a pen and paper, rolling dice and keeping score. I suppose that's the allure of D&D for those who like to play: It's a bit of a combination of both things.

But old-school RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons did manage to bring one clever innovation to the world of gaming, and that is the following: In most RPGs, there are various types or classes of characters from which to choose. Players could choose to be a thief-type character, for example, and being a thief meant you scored high on some traits (sneakiness? agility?) and lower on others (strength? honesty?). Wizard-type characters had a different set of strengths. Knight-type characters had others still.

What's attractive about this kind of game feature is that the whole game plays differently, depending on one's strengths and weaknesses. Suppose the player has to open a locked door. A thief might have to pick the lock, a giant might have to break the door down, a wizard might have to cast a spell… In order to build up enough points to manage opening the door, the thief character might have to spend some time acquiring thief-related points, obtaining lock picks, and so on. A wizard, on the other hand, might have to spend time on completely different activities, such as studying spells or acquiring potions or magic wands, or whatever the case might be. The point is that gameplay requires only that the door be opened; how a player managed to do that depended on his or her choice of character. Not only do different players get to have different kinds of experiences, the same game can be played hundreds of different ways, based on one's choice of character and list of strengths and weaknesses.

This gameplay innovation, given to us by the old RPGs of the 70s and 80s, bled over into computer-based RPGs like "Final Fantasy" and "Quest for Glory." This, in turn, inspired fighting games like Street Fighter II, with characters whose controls were radically different from each other; and racing games, in which different cars had different strengths and could approach terrain and speed differently.

Forty years later, it's not much of an innovation at all. Players expect to choose among classes of characters, or to experience gameplay in which one develops some set of abilities rather than others, and the events in the game vary accordingly.

Another benefit to this kind of game feature is the fact that it feels more true-to-life. Rather than everyone's having to pretend to be the same kind of character, we get to choose that character that most appeals to us. Some of us think of ourselves more like wizards than paladins. That's normal and expected. Far better to play the character that seems more like you than to play the only character available. Or, perhaps you'd prefer playing a character that is nothing like the real you. That can be a wonderful form of escapism, too. You might never be a swaggering pirate in real life, but in an RPG, you can play at being one, just for a chance to step out of your own skin for a while.

What makes this all work is the fact that the players know they are playing a game. We can choose which role we want to play, from a relatively small set of options, knowing full well that we can always start the game over again and play as a different kind of character. Today, I can choose to be a great wizard; tomorrow, I can be a swordsman who knows nothing about magic at all. It would be incredibly odd if your ability to play a particular game were defined entirely by the choice you made the first time around. It wouldn't be very appealing to play a game in which you could choose from twelve different characters, but if you chose to be the Elf the first time around, that impacted how you played the game the second time, the third time, and every time thereafter. That wouldn't be a very fun RPG; we might enjoy playing the first time, but subsequent rounds of the game would be frustrating, as a player tried to convert his homunculus character into an evil succubus or something.

In life, we don't get to start the game over and choose again. If we choose one path the first time around, we can always sort of pull back, change our minds, and follow a different life path later on, but that new path will be greatly impacted by the choices we made initially. Life is more like the less-fun version of the RPG.

Even as little as fifty years ago, a person could change course in their careers, go back to school, and have a quite illustrious "round two." Factory workers could become policemen. Teachers could become doctors. Ex-convicts could become lawyers. Author Edgar Rice Burroughs, of Tarzan fame, worked as a salesman, a rancher, a miner, a military man, a journalist… and a famous author. My own grandfather was a farmer, a mechanic, and a consultant for the state Timber and Coal department.

Today, though, this seems almost incomprehensible. The only valid "second rounds" in a person's professional life involve either transitioning from ground-level work to sales or management, or going from a low-skill job to a skilled profession. No one goes from ranching to mining, as Burroughs did, unless that means being a Manager of Data Science for a ranching concern to being a Manager of Data Science for a mining concern, and that's not really the same thing, is it?

The more exposure you get to any given world, the more you realize how small that world is, especially as you climb your way toward the top. There are only a handful of noteworthy university professors, for example. If you're one of them, chances are you know or have heard of most of the others. The same is true for any industry, be it cars or oil or pharmaceuticals or chemicals or software. There are millions of people at the ground-level, but once you've worked your way to one of the higher echelons, the world gets really very small. Before you know it, you couldn't possibly imagine playing as a new character and starting over again.

I don't know whether this is good or bad. I don't know whether this is "just life" or whether there was a benefit to living in a bygone era, in which one could try one's hand at all manner of work and live a contented life throughout. Or was it simply not very contented at all? Was it considered a personal failure if a person sold their farm and went to work in an automobile factory?

In any case, these days I have the feeling that the Elves don't hang out much with the Knights. The Knights don't have a lot to say to the Thieves. The Thieves and the Sorceresses don't intermingle. Once someone gets swept up by a life in politics, say, that becomes their world. They don't spend much time hanging out with auto mechanics; not because they don't like mechanics, but simply because there's no common experience uniting those people to each other.

It's possible for specialization of task -- and industry -- to drive people too far apart. When I think back to the school kids sitting in a circle, playing RPGs, I think of their diverse backgrounds, but that they were basically united by the fact that they went to the same schools, lived in the same communities, and shared at least an interest in RPGs. They grew up, their life choices caused their paths to diverge, and now they don't even have those things in common anymore. One is a doctor, one is an office worker, one started her own business, one barely scrapes by…

Without any kind of social glue keeping us together, we drift apart.

The Two Prides

Pride is an unhelpful word because it is basically one name for two distinct concepts.

One concept is unabashedly positive; it's the pleasure a person feels when they experience a sense of self-satisfaction. Suppose you learn how to play a particularly challenging piece of music, or you run faster than you expected during a race. You'd feel pride. I don't know anyone who would argue that this kind of pride is a negative thing. This kind of pride is so positive that you can even feel it when thinking about other people. You can feel proud of your child or your spouse. You can feel proud of your friends or your countrymen. A simple pleasure, a simple self-satisfaction, felt for being connected to someone who accomplished something. Pride!

The other concept called "pride" is negative. That's what you feel when you're so afraid of losing face that you refuse to acknowledge your own shortcomings. Suppose you're having an argument with your spouse, and it turns out that you're wrong. Some people won't apologize. Some people won't admit to any wrongdoing. Instead, they'll huff and puff and harrumph and pretend as though, even if they were wrong, it was someone else's fault somehow. It's a deflection of negative feelings, and a protection against narcissistic injury. This negative version of pride is also a sense of being so self-satisfied that one can't see one's own weaknesses, as when a sports team with a winning streak starts to feel so confident that they underestimate the ability of the underdog team who goes on to beat them in the end.

As far as I can tell, the only thing these two concepts have in common is that they involve positive self-appraisal. Other than that minute point, they are completely different feelings, totally different emotions, and should have entirely different names.

I first became aware of the distinction when I was a teenager in religiously conservative Utah. There, the mormon church teaches emphatically that all forms of pride are negative. I think the basic idea is that the more highly you think of yourself, the less time you spend thinking about how sinful you are, and how inferior to god.

But what clued me in to the distinction between negative and positive pride was the fact that so many religious people I knew used the word "prideful" to describe people who were proud. That is, these folks didn't use the word proud at all. It was always "prideful."

When I look these two words up in the dictionary, the word "proud" gives me both a negative and a positive definition, reflecting the distinct concepts described above; the word "prideful," meanwhile, only gives me a description of the negative version.

Perhaps, in some years, "prideful" and "proud" will be the two names for the distinct concepts I've just described. At least they will be distinguished in adjectives. I guess that would result in a world in which "pride" is the positive name and "pridefulness" is the negative name, although that distinction doesn't presently exist today.

People Treat Me Differently Now That My Hair Is Longer

I have started to notice that people see me differently, and treat me differently.

My hair has finally reached a length that could be called "long hair" by some. It hangs in my face, it blows in the wind, I can form it into a ponytail. It comes down to my chin in the front and is slightly longer as it moves back.

As it was growing out, it went through many stages, but each stage was a version of "short hair." Even as it began to get floppy, I still would have called it short. Now, though, it has unambiguously reached the "long hair" category, even if it isn't yet shoulder length.

This is important because now, when strangers first see me, they form an impression of me that includes my long hair. I still dress more or less the same, and I'm obviously still the same person I was when I have short hair. I haven't changed, but my hair has; it's the only significant physical change I've undergone over the past year or so.

The result of all this is that the first impression I give to people is different now. I notice that people treat me differently now that I have long hair.

For one thing, people used to mostly ignore me as I ran. In some cases, I think some were afraid of me, because I typically run faster than most people, with sunglasses on, without a shirt, etc. I'd even wear a bandana as my hair was getting longer. Now, I put it in a ponytail, and no one seems afraid. People smile at me much more often as I run; pleasant, friendly smiles as though acknowledging a neighbor. It's great.

At work, or walking around downtown, the case is similar. Whereas before people would refuse to make eye contact with me, sometimes seemingly attempting to walk right through me as though I wasn't there, now people smile, or nod, or even greet me.

When I play live music, people are much more receptive to my on-stage persona now. The music is the same, but the look is enough to capture a little more attention from the crowd. Perhaps it gives me more credibility as an artist, since people expect artists and musicians to have long hair. Or perhaps it's just visually more interesting, which helps the audience tune-in to what we're doing a little more.

I expected that, at work, long hair would reduce my credibility. I expected people to take me less seriously and think less of my ideas when presented. So far, though, that hasn't happened, either. And since people seem to be a bit friendlier to a long-haired guy, I've been able to make good working relationships with coworkers I've only recently met. Perhaps they remember me a little easier, since I'm more easily identifiable now.

This has been a good change for me, and very unexpected. At the risk of reading too much into everything, I feel more as though people see me the way I see myself: friendlier, more artistic, calmer, more open. Maybe, for whatever reason, the long hair conveys more of that impression to others. Or maybe I simply feel different with long hair and therefore act differently. Perhaps it's a combination of both factors.

One thing is for certain: people treat me differently now that I have long hair. I didn't really expect it, but I quite like the change.

Fat, Brazen, And Self-Absorbed

Have you noticed it, too?

Have you noticed the rise of what I’ll call “livin’ large culture?” I’ve met a definitely-not-trivial number of wealthy people who seem to deliberately pursue a lifestyle that is sure to have them dead in their fifties. They weigh literally over three-hundred pounds, they golf a lot, they’re rich, and their main interests are whiskey and cigars. Obviously there’s nothing wrong with being rich or golfing a lot, but being morbidly obese while simultaneously binging on cigars and hard liquor is going to kill them. They know, and they don’t care. This is a mystery to me because these are highly intelligent, self-made men. If anyone would know better than to make a habit of ingesting large amounts of carcinogens voluntarily, it would be the group of people known as “well-educated millionaires.” I have no explanation for why these people exist. Does their success make them weary of additional years of life? Is there something about being a millionaire that causes a person to want to cut his life short? I don’t fault them for their tastes in alcohol and tobacco, but in the 21^st Century, money can buy so much more than that: exotic vacations, less carcinogenic drugs, romantic liaisons, high-tech gadgets, or literally anything else that won’t waste your liver and lungs and give you seven kinds of cancer.

But, no.

Have you noticed “more is more culture?” This is perhaps best illustrated by American society’s current preoccupation with bacon. I like bacon. A couple of strips of bacon taste good to me, either crisscrossed on top of a hamburger or alongside a breakfast omelet. But “more is more culture” demands, well, more. Restaurants now serve things with extra bacon to the extreme. Up until a few months ago, at Chili’s, for example, you could get a regular bacon cheeseburger, or you could get this other thing that was decorated with about as much bacon as there was beef. Insane. Looking at their menu just now, I see that that burger has been replaced by something called “The Boss Burger,” which, according to Chili’s own nutritional information, clocks in at 1,660 calories ignoring the side of French fries it comes with. 1,040 of those calories are comprised of fat. That means that a full 2/3 of the burger is made of fat. The burger’s sodium content clocks in at 2,880 mg, or 25% more than a sedentary adult should eat in a single day. Again: this excludes the French fries. It goes without saying that eating such a thing will hurt your body. You will become inflamed and uncomfortable. You will likely experience insulin resistance. You’ll become tired and, if you’re not used to eating such things, you’ll get a headache.

Such menu items merely serve to feed “more is more culture” its food. There are many other ways this culture feeds itself and many different things it eats.

Cadillac Escalades, for example, were once about the biggest SUV you could buy, but today there are sundry Yukons and Suburbans that dwarf them, providing literally four rows of seating for average American households that have declined steadily for the past 60 years. It’s now possible for a middle-class family to purchase an eighty-six inch television for non-commercial use. Eighty-six inches is over seven feet of screen. Game of Thrones is just fine, but do we really need to the shape of the characters’ retinal capillaries? And while the average American adult weighs less than the three-hundred-pound guys who are “livin’ large,” the men now boast of “dad bod” and the women campaign on social media for the normalization of plus-size. That’s “plus-size” as in more than the regular sizes. Seemingly every aspect of the human experience is spreading out.

Everywhere I go, it seems that the principle goal of people is to occupy as much space as humanly possible, whether it be occupied with their plus-sized cars, plus-sized bodies, or plus-sized attitudes. Nearly each time I run or cycle on the road, cars honk angrily and people swear at me for having the nerve to be a non-vehicle on the shoulder of the road. Some even slow down, roll down their windows, and advise me to get off the road, knowing full well that I am both legally entitled to run or bike on the road and that I happen to have the legal right-of-way! You can’t go to any sort of public event like a music festival or an arts demonstration without the many space-occupiers spreading out their picnic blankets, folding chairs, nieces, and nephews out to occupy as much space as possible – before anyone else has a chance to occupy any space of their own! On a recent trip to a movie theater, I watched as a young boy and his sister positioned themselves on the two outermost seats of an entire row, “saving seats” for a whole row of their family members, who came much later and with great noise and fanfare. Meanwhile, urban sprawl consumes every last visible patch of green space imaginable, the bulldozers and backhoes mowing down every tree and filling every pond so that the next plus-sized family can populate that virgin 0.3 acres with a swimming pool too small to swim in, an outdoor grill too large to fully use, a dining room too expansive to have a conversation in, two or even three dining tables, a litter of iPad-surfing narcissists, and a surreptitious infestation of rats.

Look, I’m not merely being a misanthrope here. This is a real problem. It’s a problem when urban sprawl replaces a diverse ecosystem with a foreign one comprised of just five animal species: Humans, and dogs, rats, and house spiders they carry with them everywhere. That problem is made all the worse when the local homeowner’s association prohibits all but a list of 20 yard plant species. It’s a problem when cars are made so large that people feel uneasy driving down streets on which they might encounter a pedestrian. It’s a problem when the aspirational ideal of the human diet is something that will give you both cancer and type two diabetes if prolonged for more than about a decade. And it’s a problem when not even fabulous wealth can elevate you out of this mindset, when it actually embeds it deeper into your psyche such that you will cigar yourself to death.

It’s not consumption that I object to, nor is it over-population. There’s something brazenly wasteful about the way people operate, almost as if acknowledging the needs of other people diminishes the experience. When businesses buy up an acreage, mow down every tree on the land, and then leave it dormant for two years while they wait for the land to increase in value, the economic aspect of it doesn’t bother me. It’s the aesthetic part the kills me. Why mow down every tree? It’s as though the land were a freshly baked pie that someone decided to take five bites out of – from the precise center of the pie – and then leave it on the counter so that anyone else who wants pie is forced to have a badly misshapen piece, partially eaten by a stranger.

When you watch toddlers play, you’ll notice how they carelessly toss aside toys when those toys no longer captivate their attention. They’ll be playing with a ball, notice a train, drop the ball onto the floor, letting it roll wherever it may, and run toward the train. They have no concept of tidiness, and barely any awareness of the fact that someone else in the room may wish to play with the ball, or someone in the future might want to find the ball. They are simply, in that moment, finished with the ball and onto the train. Even if we teach the toddler to clean up the ball when playtime is over, we still haven’t addressed the fundamental issue, which is an awareness in the immediate moment of how our present actions might impact bystanders.

This – well, what is it? an emotion? an attitude? an aesthetic? – has begun to permeate all aspects of life. My interests, here, now, in the present moment trump not only every other person who is and who might be, but even the interests of my own future self! I smoke the cigar. I eat the bacon. I super-size the family cars. I lay my homestead across the middle of everything, uprooting animal, mineral, and vegetable and replacing it with a stone grotto pool and a “kegerator.”

It shouldn’t be illegal. But we as a society should voluntarily for more than this.

A Message To My Prior Self -- Hair Edition

In my early twenties, I somehow managed to apply my will power to the project of growing my hair out. It took a long time, but eventually it grew out to the point where it could be considered “long hair,” could be assembled into a ponytail, etc. It only lasted this way very briefly, though. In a fit of self-consciousness, I shaved it all off and went back to short hair from then on out. From time to time, over the ensuing years, I’d attempt to grow it out again, quickly grow frustrated, and let it be short.

I most recently shaved my head last summer. I can’t really recall my reasoning, other than that I wanted a change. As it grew back out, I kept the sides short and let the top grow, until it became what they refer to in haircutting circles as an “undercut.” At that point, my wife suggested that I let it grow long and see what happens. I’ve been growing it out ever since.

There are a few things I’ve learned from this, which I’d like to share with all those who might consider growing their own hair out in the future.

First, there is no “awkward phase.” More precisely, nobody cares what your hair looks like, as long as it’s clean and combed. When your hair is short, you can put some gunk in it and mess it around, and it looks good no matter what, because that’s the style: messy. Once it achieves a critical length, you can start combing it. Comb it back, to the side, or whatever else. Whatever you do with it, it will look like hair that you take care of. It might fall short of your GQ Magazine dream, but no one is really evaluating your sense of style on that level. So, just relax about awkwardness. If you stand up straight, and comb your hair, it will only be as awkward as society’s tendency to weigh in on your hairstyle, which society almost never does. So you’re good.

Second, starting with an “undercut” was a good idea. I remember that the first time I grew my hair out, the back and sides always appeared longer than the top, risking a sort of mini-mullet look. That look persisted until my hair got long enough to need to be cut, mostly to correct this very problem. But starting with an undercut type style ensures that the top is always a bit longer than the back and sides. As it starts to grow longer, everything will have an overall more natural appearance, almost as though it’s all closer to one length (even though it isn’t). I wish I had had this foresight in my early twenties; if so, I might have had long hair for many years.

Third, you only need enough patience to grow your hair out to the point that it looks like it’s being grown out. After that, the eye perceives “long hair,” even though it’s short. Put another way, short hair that has grown too long looks messy; but long hair that isn’t long enough still looks like long hair. It took me roughly 9 or 10 months to get to this length, again, from a starting point of “completely shaven.” But a lot of that time was easy to sit through because I had clean-cut short hair styles during the period of growth. So it’s really powering through 2 or 3 months of final growth from “short hair” to “longish hair” that requires any patience. If you can keep yourself busy for those 2 months, then you’ll finally reach a point that requires no additional patience.

Long story short: If you want to grow your hair out, but you’re worried about how difficult it is, don’t worry. It’s surprisingly easy.

A Driving Paradigm Shift

I know none of you ever feel frustrated on the road, but sometimes when I'm driving, believe it or not, my patience wears a little thin. But my commute is pretty long, and so I've had a lot of time to think about driving calmly, quickly, and efficiently - what works, and what doesn't.

Well, I've discovered two things and between the two of them they have completely revolutionized the way I think about driving. So I'm passing along the info in case you find it useful.

First: "Queue versus Flow"

I think most people view traffic as a queue. In fact, in the UK, they use the word "queue" in place of the phrase "traffic jam." The problem with conceiving of traffic as a queue, though, is that it biases you into believing (erroneously) that every car in front of you is delaying your arrival at your destination. 

Of course, that's silly. If you're traveling 45 mph down the road, you will travel 45 miles over the span of an hour whether there are 3 cars ahead of you or 300. 

Knowing this, I starting conceiving of traffic as a flow. What matters in a flow is not how many particles there are, but how fast they're all going, on average. Most traffic events that we all experience only set us back a total of, say, 2 or 3 minutes. It's tempting to lose your patience if someone cuts in front of you and slows you down, but this doesn't really impact your average speed in most cases. You might arrive a few seconds later, but if traffic is a flow and not a queue, then who cares? 

Second, my Eco Display

My car has a really cool feature called "Eco Display," which tracks how much energy you save based on the way you drive. It has three separate meters: One tracks energy savings captured by making light use of the accelerator; One tracks energy savings captured by how much you coast, rather than using the brake; And the third tracks energy savings captured by maintaining a relatively constant speed, rather than speeding up and slowing down repeatedly. 

It looks like this:

In light of the fact that I see traffic as a "flow" now, I make really good use of the Eco Display. I accelerate slowly and leave lots of space between myself and the next car, so that I can minimize use of the brake pedal and maintain as close to a constant average speed as possible, given traffic conditions. 

It's amazing to see how many cars will angrily pass me as I accelerate, only to slam on their brakes a few seconds later as they catch up to the next car, and then within seconds I've caught up to them. And since I have more space in front of me to see traffic, I can usually anticipate slow-downs, change lanes, keep my constant average speed, and pass the people who thought they were passing me.

It's like a whole new paradigm. It's totally changed the way I drive. I love it.

Loyalty

Image courtesy Wikipedia.org

Years ago, I had a couple of friends, let's call them Ken and Kyle*.

Of the two, I was much closer to Ken. I knew him for longer, had more in common with him, shared a lot of fun times with him, even shared a living space with him for a brief time. We met Kyle through a mutual interest of ours, and the three of us hit it off. We spent many long afternoons pursuing our mutual interest, and also talking about life, as friends often do.

Early on, though, Kyle and I clashed on our taste in music. Kyle liked X, while I preferred Y. For a long time, I thought this was actually a good thing, since it allowed us to swap CDs, show each other new music, explore our differences, have spirited debate. It was fun for me, because I like talking about music, and by all appearances, so did Kyle. We didn't have to agree, as far as I was concerned, because the conversation itself was fun.

What I failed to notice was that Kyle only enjoyed talking about music when we agreed with each other. If the topic were King's X, for example, we could go for days! We loved those guys. Change the topic to Primus and it was a whole other ballgame. Because I thought we were enjoying ourselves, I'd keep the conversations going. It turned out that all I was doing was bothering Kyle.

As time went on, Ken grew closer to Kyle than I did. Still, I considered them both to be good friends.

Then one day Kyle invited Ken and I, along with another mutual friend of ours, Tim*, over to his house to hang out. There, he sat us all down in a circle and proceeded to air all of his grievances with me. He didn't like the way I looked, he didn't like my attitude, he was upset by a few of things I had done, and a couple of things I hadn't but should have. Tim echoed Kyle's grievances. Ken said nothing at all. This went on for a long time.

Most of Kyle's complaints were unreasonable, and the few that were reasonable were misunderstandings. I tried to defend myself, but the process itself was designed to be an onslaught, I was intended to be out-numbered, and this was clearly a severance, not an intervention. This was good-bye, and good riddance, to Ryan.

After some time, Ken finally chimed in. He vouched for my personality by recounting the story of a time when I had offered Ken some friendly emotional support when he needed it, when no one else was around to give it to him. Kyle and Tim didn't respond to that much, they simply doubled-down on Kyle's list of grievances. Ken fell silent again.

That was the last time I ever laid eyes on Kyle, although Tim, to his credit, apologized to me years later - an apology I gladly accepted, and today I count him among my friends. For a long time, however Ken remained close friends with Kyle and Tim, and continued to hang out with them - without me - for years after this occurred.

In my vanity, I expected that my old friend would stand by me, would walk out of Kyle's house by my side, loyal to the friendship that we had had for years prior to meeting Kyle or Tim. But that just didn't happen. Some time later, I asked Ken who he thought was in the right. He said he thought they had done me wrong, but that he just wished we could all be friends. Of course, he was spending a lot more time with the other two at this point, several nights a week, while I hardly saw him at all anymore and had to move on to a different friends group, forging some new strong relationships entirely.

In essence, I'd lost my good friend Ken to a couple of guys who had treated me unfairly. Ken knew I'd been done wrong but it wasn't enough to convince him that I was a better friend than they were. He preferred them.

That stung, and my relationship to Ken never recovered.

Since then, I've been particularly sensitive to loyalty in friendship. "People-pleasers" often try to patch things over with everyone involved - and for the record, Ken is no people-pleaser - but what they lack is a sense of justice, a clear set of beliefs about what kind of people they are willing to keep as friends. Impressionable people will go along with whatever the majority decides, and if they lose a friend or two along the way, they make it up in numbers. Ken wasn't an impressionable person like that, either, though.

Ken's problem, I now believe, is that he could only recognize loyalty as a good thing when it went his way. When it cost him something, it was too much. So my early showing of loyalty to him - being there for him when no one else would - carried emotional significance for him, but not enough for him to reciprocate. When he actually observed people abandoning me unfairly, and insulting me as they did it, it wasn't enough to trigger his sense of loyalty.

Over the years, I have been through several other instances of seeing some of my friends stand idly by while lesser, peripheral friends and acquaintances  insulted me. When I notice that one of my chosen friends has no loyalty to express toward me, that friendship withers instantly on my end. I'll likely continue to be friendly with the person, but I will never again consider them close, nor will I put forth effort to bring them closer.

The importance of loyalty isn't abstract. In life, we often face harsh treatment from people. We require loyalty in our close relationships because we must trust our friends to support and protect us when we need it. Otherwise, what is friendship beyond being in the same place at the same time, and having occasional conversations? Loyalty reflects a shared sense of ethics and a mutual esteem. Like anything else, it can be taken too far, but without it the mutual respect between friends disappears. There's only so much a shared interest in cars, for example, can get you with another person. It has to be a shared interest in cars, plus the belief that the other person is someone worth vouching for.

So, it hurts when you're not vouched for when you need to be. If you don't have any friends around, then you can always find solace in your support group when you're near them again. But if you're already near your support group and it doesn't offer you support, then it's double the damage; first, you've been wronged, and second you've been denied the support to which you feel entitled. It's worse than never having that support in the first place.

Disloyal people, however, soon reap what they sow. Loyalty can only ever be reciprocal. A relationship in which A is loyal to B, but B is disloyal to A will collapse under the imbalance. Part of being deserving of loyalty is demonstrating loyalty oneself. So those who fail to show loyalty will, over time, loose access to the friendship of all those for whom loyalty is genuinely important - i.e. the very people from whom they most likely would have received loyalty.

_______________
*Obviously I've changed their names - I have never been friends with anyone named Ken or Kyle.