How To Meet The Love Of Your Life

When I was fresh out of college, I was working at a place where lots of young people my age worked. It was a lot of fun, because we all liked to laugh and hang out together. Every day at work was like spending time with a big group of friends. Those are always the best workplaces, at least when you're young.

One of my fellow coworkers - let's call her S - was something of a workplace stereotype: she was young, very beautiful, had recently been through a breakup, and had thus started to sleep around a lot, and consequently a lot of the young men in the workplace had started to pay a lot of extra attention to her. She enjoyed the attention, and they enjoyed giving it to her, and the rest, as they say, is history. 

At the time, I didn't fully understand this dynamic. It wasn't until a few years later, after I had worked for a few different employers and observed the same phenomenon again and again that I finally wrapped my head around it. I remember working in a big office in Ottawa, and there was one very attractive and newly hired young woman there. Let's call her L. L spent half her time joking innocently with the men in the office and the other half of the time talking about her boyfriend. But she was 22 years old and fresh out of college, and all the creepy old men in the office knew she was going to soon break up with her boyfriend and inevitably start sleeping around. They were hanging on for their chance, when it inevitably happened. And it did. 

I don't fault anyone for "shooting their shot," but it bothered me a lot that many of the guys surrounding L all the time were twenty years older than she was, and married. They were creeps. L couldn't see it, because she was young, naive, and convinced that all these creeps were just fun guys to hang out with at work. It was a path to being used.

That was years after I met S, but S was in a similar situation. S had a lot of other issues going on with her, as well: she had unresolved parental baggage, had experienced a certain amount of abuse, was possibly bisexual in an extremely conservative community, and so on. But she was also a very nice young lady with a terrific sense of humor, and she made great conversation. So she and I became fast friends.

One time, S and I were talking. She mentioned that she gets lonely, and that was one of the reasons she got attached to so many guys. I suggested that she try hanging out with friends instead. I told her that she had lots of friends, and she should spend her time with them if she felt lonely.

When she heard this, she laughed, and said, "And what if I feel like having sex? Should I call up my friend Breanne and say, 'Hey, can you help me out with this?'"

I laughed, too. But I didn't reply.

*        *        *

Although S and I were good friends and very compatible at the time, we never got together. I ended up in a relationship with a very different kind of woman. Let's call that woman M. M was funny, smart, and one of the most terrific friends I ever had.

M was also depressed, a fact I didn't initially notice or understand about her. Being with M gradually slid into a very difficult relationship. Prozac Nation is one of the most accurate portrayals of depression I have ever seen on film; being in a relationship with M often times felt a lot like being a character in Prozac Nation. Perhaps a better man could have persevered in a relationship like that. As for me, I didn't have the right stuff. M and I went our separate ways.

Building a life together with someone involves creating a trajectory for yourself. Your mutual aspirations fuse together into a coherent plan forward, and everything you do becomes a march toward your aspirational goal. Or, one of you is crushingly depressed and neither of you can see beyond the fog descending all around you. A bad relationship - even between good people - will rob you of your sense of self and steal from you any kind of trajectory you once had. You become a very different person than you are used to being, a very different person than the one you always wanted to be. Your life becomes a game of perpetuating the relationship, of always trying to save it from the inevitable.

Truly, you can live your whole life that way. What happened to me, however, was that I made a sort of rational realization one day: If I fight this hard in a relationship this bad, imagine what I might be able to achieve if I fought that hard for a relationship that was even just a little bit better. I knew what kind of effort I was capable of; I had been putting in that effort for years. What if there was someone out there who was capable of putting in even a fraction of that effort... for me?

*        *        *

Like many people who go through break-ups, I had spent months breaking up with M and not even realizing it. I got out of a dead-end public service job and into a really exciting consulting job. I stopped shaving my head. I started training hard as a runner again. I wrote a dozen really good songs. I even changed what soap I was using. It was a metamorphosis I simply didn't recognize until M and I called things off, and I moved out. Moving out even entailed getting a new apartment, and buying a new car. And of course that new job required a new wardrobe. An outside observer might have said that I had become a completely different person, but the truth is that I had become more of myself. 

That in itself is a whole story that needs telling, but what matters here is that I had stripped myself of the pieces of my identity that weren't actually mine to begin with. Those pieces belonged to the relationship I was in, and the identity that went along with it. The new pieces were the ones I put there by choice, deliberately, based on my own beliefs about who I really am.

This was my crossroads. At this point, I could go the way of S or L. I was young, gainfully employed, fit, attractive, and surrounded by beautiful people who also didn't mind being surrounded by me. 

*        *        *

I had already undergone a significant metamorphosis. It occurred to me that I might take it further. What if, instead of just becoming a better person, I decided to shoot for the moon? What if, instead of living a better life, I aimed to live an ideal life? 

I thought about what an ideal life might actually be like. If I could be doing anything with myself, what would that be? What is the kind of thing I've always dreamed of, but which I've never dared to attempt?

Well, people have all kinds of dreams. Some dream of being rich and famous, others dream of being captains of industry or CEOs; some want to become artists and undertake the Bohemian life, others have wanderlust and set out to see the world. Some have simple dreams, like being parents or living in an old farmhouse; others hatch complex schemes of achieving a list of accomplishments at specified points in their lives.

When I thought about the kind of life I dreamed of living, I thought about a peaceful little beach I saw in Central America. I thought about the humble but beautiful coffee estates in the mountains of El Salvador. I imagined a life in which I could live in one of those nice, small little open-air villas, drinking coffee, picking up groceries on a motorcycle, and spending my days strumming my guitar on the beach. It's not for everyone, but it's what I wanted. Maybe, while I was there, I would meet a local woman who wanted to spend her time similarly. 

With this thought in mind, I started taking small steps toward my dream. What would it take to accomplish something like that? I knew I needed a lot more money, and so I started working on my professional development. I started practicing my Spanish daily, and listening to Spanish language music and radio programs. I got rid of my TV and spent that time reading books and bettering myself. 

For a while, that became my life. I worked hard all day, put in overtime, went home and worked out, ate dinner, and then read and studied. In a way, it was lonely, but it was also extremely productive. I felt optimistic for the future, and each small thing I did in a day seemed like a tiny step I was taking in the direction of my dreams.

That was when I discovered the secret.

*        *        *

I had a vision of the future and a small amount of momentum taking me toward it. What I soon discovered is that people gravitate toward these kinds of vectors. In the dating market and the market for friendship, people are attracted to those who know where they're going, even if that destination is different from what they themselves prefer.

You could think of it like this: millions of other 28-year-old men in the world had good jobs and a reasonably sunny disposition; only a few knew what they wanted out of life.

Of course, here I must pause to point out that many 28-year-old men know what they want out of life, and what they want is lots of casual sex and some good times. That's not a vision for a lifetime, that's a vision for next Saturday night. People aren't attracted to a great vision of next Saturday night - at least, not the kind of people you want to spend your life with. People are attracted to a great vision for a lifetime. 

I met many women during this period of my life, and more to the point, many women met me. That is, I suddenly found myself the center of a great deal of positive attention. That was great. Although I met many women, I did not date many women. This is where my path diverged from that of S and L.

I had another friend we'll call A. A lived thousands of miles away, and was in a similar situation as I was. We both had our own chosen visions of the future and wanted to achieve them. We were both interested in finding a person to share it with. But, while I was searching for the kind of woman I definitely knew wouldn't hurt me like M did, A was not being as deliberate in her search.

Then, one day, we were IM-ing about our respective dating lives. While I was working my way closer and closer toward the kind of women I felt really good about dating, A had been on a string of dates and was casually having sex with a number of men, with no serious prospects on the horizon.

I started telling A about my philosophy, about how I had devised a vision of the future that I wanted, and about how the women I wanted to date were all people who respected that vision and wanted to be a part of it, people who could nurture me as a person as I nurtured them, people I could fall in love with. And the more I held that in mind as my ideal, the closer I seemed to get.

Then my friend A said, "I have physical needs, and I need to get those met." She sounded just like S. And just like S, A was taking herself further and further away from positive, nurturing relationships, positioning herself to be used by opportunistic partners who were not interested in her long-term vision.

And the kicker is: A was willing to give it all up to get her physical needs met. I've been horny, too, but Jesus Christ.

*        *        *

Flash forward some thirteen years.

I am married to a wonderful woman I met during that phase of my life. We moved somewhere warm and pleasant, and possibly temporary. We still share that vision of the future that I developed long ago, but we also recognize that if we achieve the same headspace in a different location, that will be okay, too. But we are still taking steps toward it. Meanwhile, we have two beautiful children, a comfortable living situation, all of our basic needs are met, and we have a wonderful, loving relationship.

A is doing okay. She could be doing better. Her ambition is a shadow of what it once was, and she went through a long period of very mentally difficult years.

S is also doing okay, but she never went anywhere in life. She's a single mother. She's still beautiful, but she lives a hard life.

I didn't keep up with L.

I also didn't keep up with M, but by all accounts, she is doing okay, too, and I'm happy about that.

It's easy to compare myself to people who are doing a lot worse than I am, and of course that isn't really the point. At the same time, I also can't deny that my life is going really well, and my choices and philosophies have played a direct role in achieving that result. I'm still on a positive trajectory, and I'm the one who put myself on that trajectory. Life is good for me in large part because I chose a good path.

And I met and married the love of my life. I achieved this by arriving at a vision of what kind of person I wanted to be in an ideal state, and taking consistent steps toward that goal. In doing so, I instantly became a more attractive person to the people around me. People are hungry for positive directions, they want to be a part of a good thing. Even if they don't want to be a part of it, they want to spectate.

So, developing a dream of what kind of good person you want to be, and attempting to become that good person, is how you meet the love of your life.

Stationary Waves And Coronavirus

The concept of temperance has been a feature of this blog for many years. When I talk about temperance, I'm not talking about eschewing alcohol, but the two ideas do have commonalities. Temperance, broadly construed, means having enough restraint to not just do, you know, whatever the hell you want to do, whenever the hell you want to do it. Temperance means keeping your hedonic urges in check long enough to make sensible decisions in accordance with your longer cognitive time-horizon. See this old post on the issue for a brief primer.

There are many articles and blog posts out there discussing the matter of what is the correct policy response to the coronavirus epi/pan-demic. There is plenty of criticism to go around. Who did what, and did they do it how soon? What aspect of testing or messaging did the CDC botch, what can be learned from the mass quarantines in other countries?

In one sense, I think it's natural that people want to look at it from those angles. I can sympathize with that inclination. It's much easier to have a debate about public policy and to get worked up about all the wrong things someone else did than it is to simply acknowledge that pandemics occur approximately once every one hundred years, and that using political machinery to stop the spread of viruses is ultimately a futile endeavor. We'd have better luck stopping an incoming asteroid.

The fact of the matter is that there is nothing that the government can do to protect you from communicable viruses. They will spread, because that's what viruses do. It's the circle of life.

On a personal note, most readers will probably have nothing to worry about with respect to COVID-19, anyway; the death rate for most people appears to be somewhere between 0.1% and 1.0%. Those are very good odds for a virus like this. But for me, it's different. I'm "immuno-compromised." I'm a type 1 diabetic. For me, the death rate might be something more like 9%, and the rate of hospitalization independent of death is much higher for me than it is for the population at large.

This thing can kill me.

On the one hand, we could say that coronavirus is a public health emergency. On the other hand, we should probably say that the public health emergency already exists. I see just how much other human beings spread their germs around on a daily basis. You people are absolutely filthy. I see multiple people per day walk out of public restrooms without washing their hands. I see people playing with their noses, mouths, eyes, and then putting their hands all over public surfaces. I see people cough without covering their mouths, I see people spit out of their car windows, I see people blow their noses by plugging one nostril, leaning to the side, and blasting debris onto the sidewalk. It's disgusting. And these aren't low-brow "others" in some "other" part of town. These are the middle and upper class people in "nice" neighborhoods. These are the normies. And they're filthy, filthy people.

Earlier this morning, I saw a Facebook advertisement for a bidet. The comments under the ad were everything I've come to expect from filthy Americans. They expressed incredulity and skepticism, they laughed, they mocked, they teased... This is happening during a global pandemic. Here we have a centuries-old device that can vastly improve American hygiene and reduce the spread of communicable illness, and even during a global pandemic Americans' response is one of mockery and skepticism.

That mockery and skepticism, combined with Americans' refusal to wash their hands, cover their mouths, and avoid blowing their noses on the sidewalk, is what will ultimately be to blame for the spread of coronavirus and diseases like it. It's easy to point fingers at the CDC for botching "testing," but the demand for "testing" would be decidedly low if Americans knew how to wash their hands, backsides, and faces, and knew how to keep public surfaces clean and disease-free.

Naturally, there's nothing I can do from my perch above my keyboard, writing on an unread blog about how Americans are a travesty of public filth. But maybe things could get a little bit better on the margins if we all thought a little bit more about temperance.

If you find it tempting to blow your nose on the sidewalk, exercise a little temperance. Find your way to the nearest tissue, and use that instead. If you find it somewhat of a hassle to wash your hands every time you use the bathroom, exercise a little temperance. The expedient thing is to skip the hand-washing step, but the right thing to do is to wash your hands. You might not see the point of covering your mouth when you cough or sneeze in the privacy of your own work cubicle, but I urge you to exercise a little temperance on the margins. Cover your mouth, then go wash your hands. And, for god's sake, get a bidet. They are $15 and install in seconds. Jesus.

Practically speaking, it's unlikely that you'll be able to prevent every cough, sneeze, and itch that needs scratching. You won't always be able to find your way to a bathroom in time to wash your hands or do whatever else you need to do. But if you can exercise a little temperance on the margins, then there's a slightly better chance that people like me won't die.

Please, I beg you, exercise a little temperance. Be a little bit more hygienic. This disease does not really need to spread widely in an environment in which people practice good hygiene.

Ethical Veganism: A Critique

Inspired by the latest Cato Unbound symposium, I'd like to argue for why I think ethical veganism is possibly disingenuous.

Problems With Utilitarian Calculus

The first series of issues I would like to address involve ethical vegans' claims about mitigating the suffering of animals.

Their basic argument goes something like this:

1. Animals experience at least some level of suffering and pleasure.
2. Modern meat production imposes widespread suffering on animals.
3. Even if animals are less morally important than humans, there is so much animal suffering in modern meat production that it overwhelms the human benefit of meat consumption.
4. Therefore, we should not eat meat.

The first problem with this argument is that it presupposes that humans' pleasure from meat consumption is trivial. There is no amount of human pleasure that would be enough to convince an ethical veganism that eating meat was worthwhile. This suggests to me that the utilitarian calculus involved in this argument is disingenuous. Vegans simply assume from the outset that eating meat fails to generate enough human utility to justify industrial meat production practices. 

The problem is that actually demonstrating that animal suffering is so terrible that it demands we eschew meat was the very task ethical veganism was required to demonstrate in the first place. You had one job, ethical vegans, and you merely assumed what you were supposed to prove. Or even substantiate.

The second problem with this argument is that it discounts all utilitarian benefits to animals that come from industrial meat production. The most obvious benefit is existence itself; were it not for the meat industry, many if not most livestock animals simply wouldn't exist. There are other benefits, such as secured living space, protection from natural predators, opportunities to breed, veterinary care, and so on. All of these things are provided at no small expense to humans and confer at least some utilitarian benefits to livestock animals. Even if the utilitarian value of these things is very low, it's not zero, and thus it belongs somewhere in the moral calculus. The fact that vegans omit this step in the calculus, however, suggests that their utilitarian calculus itself is disingenuous.

A third problem with the utilitarian argument for veganism is that vegans already have responses to the arguments I've made above, but their responses are not utilitarian arguments. 

For example, when asked to demonstrate animal suffering, vegans often present explicit descriptions of what life for an animal is like on a factory farm. This is an emotionally gripping argument, indeed; but it is not a calculation of utility. We might agree that animals experience suffering on factory farms, but until that suffering is quantified in a way that counter-balances against the human pleasures of meat consumption, it is merely an emotional argument, and not a utilitarian one. If ethical vegans respond to utilitarian critiques of their utilitarian arguments with non-utilitarian reasoning, this suggests that their real reasons for ethical veganism are non-utilitarian reasons.

So, in three different ways, I have shown that the utilitarian arguments for ethical veganism are disingenuous. 

A Problem With "Animal Suffering"

Non-vegans frequently point out that plant foods must be grown, and therefore require farmland. Farmland deprives animals of their habitat, and thus also causes animal suffering. 

Vegans typically respond to this by reminding us that, on a per-calorie basis, plant foods require less farmland than animal meat. But, there are two problems with this argument.

The first problem is that, in making this argument, vegans have already conceded that their food causes animal suffering. They are no longer suggesting that veganism is an ethical alternative to meat-eating; they are only saying that veganism is not as bad for animals as meat-eating is. But ethics is about more than merely avoiding the most harmful thing, it's about avoiding any harmful thing at all, wherever possible. So, the problems with agriculture aren't limited to meat-eating; an ethical vegan ought to avoid any avoidable food that causes animal suffering "unnecessarily."

This brings me to the second problem of the argument. On a per-calorie basis, surely grains and many nuts are more efficient agricultural products than meat. But this cannot possibly be true of many vegetables, such as celery (a net-negative-calorie food), herbs, lettuce, spinach, and so on. These vegetables are extremely low in calories and therefore may actually be worse for animal suffering than the raising of traditional livestock animals. And I hasten to add that this is true of the environmental impacts of such products, as well. 

Ethical vegans who wish to remain philosophically consistent should not just eschew meat, but also any vegetable product that causes more animal suffering than it's "worth." Yet, the dearth of animal-welfare arguments against the consumption of celery and parsley among ethical vegans demonstrates either that they haven't thought through the implications of their own arguments very carefully, or that the arguments themselves are disingenuous.

A Conclusion

Now, when I say "disingenuous," I don't mean to suggest that ethical vegans are trying to pull the wool over our eyes. I'm only suggesting that the arguments in favor of ethical veganism, as presented by ethical vegans, cannot possibly be the real reason these vegans believe in veganism. If, for example, a person came to believe in veganism based on utilitarian arguments, then that vegan would either be capable of providing utilitarian responses to utilitarian criticisms, or he would have to admit that the matter is as-yet unresolved. When was the last time you heard a vegan do either?

So why are people ethical vegans? 

One possibility is that they have an emotional attachment to animals that causes them to look upon industrial meat production with disgust. It's an emotional reaction, but not a hard one to understand. It's also thoroughly unobjectionable. If the way cattle are butchered makes you sick to your stomach, why should you have to eat beef? That, alone, is a valid reason to eschew beef. There is no need to pretend to be an ethical vegan. There is no reason you can't avoid meat for the simple reason that meat production seems icky to you. If so, it would be better to simply acknowledge things as they are.

Another, more unsavory, possibility is that ethical veganism is a type of moral grandstanding. To have extremely high levels of empathy is a high-status position. Imagine how much higher-status it is to have so much empathy that you are even capable of extending it to other creatures. Some people even extend their empathy to trees, even to rock formations. The more we proclaim our concern for increasingly more inanimate non-human things, the more we seem to say to our fellows, "Look here, I am the caring-est one of us all. Behold the extent to which I care for things!"

It seems likely to me that most self-proclaimed ethical vegans are some combination of the two. They don't like meat, they are grossed-out by meat production, and they want other people to know how much they care deeply for the welfare of all things. I have no objection to people's taste in food, and I don't fault anyone for being grossed out by the meat industry. My only "beef" (get it?) is with disingenuous arguments and moral grandstanding.

Excellence

Last night, I rented the movie Eat That Question: Frank Zappa In His Own Words. It is a well-edited compilation of interviews with Frank Zappa over the course of his career. For the average moviegoer, the film has little to offer, but for the Frank Zappa fan, the film is a must-watch. I will not bother with a formal movie review, however, since Eat That Question mostly consists of footage available on YouTube that has been compiled nicely into a cohesive narrative, providing insight into Zappa's artistic vision. There is nothing new to say about this film footage. If you know about this film, chances are good that you already know whether you plan on seeing it. I'll let my "review" stand at that.

Just because all of this footage had been previously released, however, doesn't mean that I had personally seen it all. One particular moment in the film stood out for me the most. When asked why he thought everyone considered him a hippy rockstar and not a composer, Zappa said something to the effect of, "Probably because they haven't been conditioned for excellence."

This seems like an arrogant thing to say, but Zappa expounded on his point, and the point recurred a few times over the course of the film. He said that the American education system mostly focuses on turning American children into adults who will succeed at getting boring, low-level factory-type jobs and buy cheap merchandise. Elsewhere in the film, Zappa references a rejected article he wrote for Time Magazine. (The article was subsequently printed in Zappa's autobiography, The REAL Frank Zappa Book.) In that article, Zappa makes the claim that Americans have a preference for "cheese," which is Frank's euphemism for cheap, low-grade, low-brow cultural artifacts like cheeseburgers and "chrome dinettes." In the film, he contrasts this American proclivity to the tendency of much older world cultures to take pride in the thousands of years of cultural history they enjoy. He points out how silly it must appear to, say, Europeans, that Americans are so fond of something like a cheeseburger, when in Europe they enjoy recipes that date back literal eons, evolving along cultural lines all the while.

So, Zappa's point was about aesthetics. Zappa believed that people ought to learn how to appreciate art, and history, and music, and pretty much everything else by taking the long view. For Zappa, it made a lot of sense to tout the likes of Beethoven as the greatest composers of music of all time. Their work represents the culmination of hundreds if not thousands of years of musical development. The great composers were worth taking pride in, because they truly represented the evolution of music as art. When we compare that to the latest top 40 thing by... oh, let's just choose a name out of a hat and say Imagine Dragons... there is not much of a comparison to be had.

To be clear, Zappa's point wasn't that it's morally wrong to enjoy Imagine Dragons. His point was that the American culture and education system such as it is leaves people completely unequipped to make informed artistic decisions about what is artistic and what isn't. Instead, the mere suggestion that Beethoven might actually be superior to Imagine Dragons elicits social media vitriol: music is subjective, and what's wrong with liking Imagine Dragons? and I'd much rather listen to pop radio than some dumb orchestra.

Suffice it to say that none of these objections defeat Zappa's point.

On a related note, somebody compiled data from Goodreads.com and provided a list of the most beloved and most hated English language classic novels of all time. To my chagrin albeit not to my surprise, Moby Dick, the single greatest novel of all time, a literary accomplishment so profound that most people will never understand the extent of its genius, ranks as one of the most-hated classics. Why?

Part of it has something to do with what I just said about it: the genius of Moby Dick is so tremendous that I don't think most people can really even understand what Melville accomplished in writing it. Even understanding the profundity of that novel is a pale reflection of the white-hot flame of ingenious creativity that was required to conceive of it; and even conceiving of it is a pale shadow compared to the actual writing of it. Moby Dick tells a thoroughly unique tale with intensely philosophic moral symbolism and a disarmingly charming prose; and that, in and of itself should be enough to make it a great novel. But then Melville found a way to literally fuse the complete works of Shakespeare with the Holy Bible -- literally, I mean he literally wrote his novel by assembling passages from both Shakespeare and the Bible to craft the language of his own story, making symbolic references to each individually, and both simultaneously, all in the service of an entirely separate story he wrote himself. And the unsuspecting reader would be none the wiser, because the novel reads wonderfully and wittily throughout. This novel isn't just Treasure Island for adults; it's a true artistic accomplishment.

But that brings me to the other reason Moby Dick is such a hated novel, and this ties to Frank Zappa's opinions as articulated above. The modern American reader does not have the mental tools required to properly evaluate Moby Dick. It kills me to think that one of America's greatest contributions to mankind's artistic canon is beyond the educational platform of the overwhelming majority of Americans.

This is precisely what Zappa wanted to warn us about: we should be remembering Moby Dick for the ages. Moby Dick is what should be leaving a lasting impression on American culture. Instead, I think more Americans probably recognize the names of politicians, pop stars, and other such flashes in the pan. This is not because Americans are too stupid to understand greatness when they see it. Rather, it's because our culture, our media, and our education system have all failed to provide us with the tools required to evaluate culture and art, and Americans left to their own devices are disinclined to pick up the slack.

By coincidence, I happened to see a video on Facebook yesterday of someone cooking boiled prawns in the Southern style. The recipe went something like this:

• Put a bunch of water in a giant pot and bring it to boil
• Add a large concoction of spices, primarily salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper
• Boil corn on the cob and potatoes in the spice/water mixture
• Remove the corn and potatoes, then add raw crawfish, prawns, shrimp, whatever, and boil until cooked
• Remove some of the shrimp and put in a mixing bowl with some of the corn and some of the potatoes
• Pour a half cup of butter over everything
• Squeeze some lemon juice over everything
• Add a bunch of lemon pepper, pepper, cayenne pepper, "cajun seasoning," smoked paprika, and a bunch of other mixed spices that are all various kinds of salt, pepper, and chili powder
• Stir
• Dump on a plate

Here's a shorter version of this recipe: Boil three different ingredients, then cover them in butter, salt, lemon juice, and cayenne pepper. This isn't a recipe for crawfish, it's a recipe for butter and cayenne pepper.

Amazingly, the broth that was created by boiling seafood in water for a couple of minutes -- while not as flavorful as it could have been, had someone with a sense of taste undertaken to make seafood broth -- was probably the most flavorful part of the entire recipe. What did the cooks do with the broth? Nothing. It was a wasteful byproduct of boiled potatoes and shrimp covered in butter.

As I watched this video, I heard in my head the voice of an old French colleague of mine, who once complained to me about how disgusting American food looked when they served it. He thought it was revolting to see big, messy globs of food heaped onto plates with no sense of care. He was right. It's hard to find a restaurant in America that doesn't serve big, salty globs of stuff. I ran past Cracker Barrel this weekend, and it was packed; I went to a nice Syrian restaurant, and it was not packed.

Why do Americans prefer boiled Southern potatoes to braised Syrian lamb? Why do they prefer Harry Potter to Moby Dick? Why do they prefer Imagine Dragons to Beethoven?

Because Frank Zappa was right: Americans lack the tools to evaluate culture properly, so we queso dip while other cultures get remoulade. It's baffling. Don't we want more for ourselves?

The Incrementalist's Mannifesto

Last night, I bought a book that I hope to review on this blog sometime soon. It's called Learn Python the Hard Way: A Very Simple Introduction to the Terrifyingly Beautiful World of Computers and Code, and its author is Zed A. Shaw.

I didn't go into the bookstore looking for a book on Python. I went because we found a bunch of gift cards lying around that we wanted to use up before they expired. When I got to the bookstore, I decided that what I wanted was a book that taught me some kind of practical skill. I seldom have time to read these days, and if I'm going to read anything at all, I'd like it to be something useful, rather than just some excuse to pass the time. (I have many other, more interesting ways to pass my time than reading.) Maybe I could learn how to draw, I thought to myself, as I perused the arts section. Maybe I could find a book on classical or flamenco guitar technique, I thought to myself, as I perused the music section. Maybe I could find a cookbook that could teach me to expand my cooking repertoire, I thought, as I perused the food section...

I found no such books in any section, because all of the books that potentially could teach me such things are written all wrong. I don't want to sit and read for two hours, taking notes, studying supplemental information, and committing concepts to memory. If I were going to do all that, I'd just enroll in a class. I don't have time for all of that. What I need is a way to learn a new skill through short, concentrated, daily practice. That's how we learn musical instruments. That's how we learn languages. That's how we train our bodies. New skills should work the same way.

So, I was slightly encouraged when I arrived at the Technology section and found a variety of programming books in which coding is taught through the use of short projects and case studies. That seemed like something I could work with. Python is also heavily utilized in my career industry, so this wouldn't merely be a practical skill, but also a professional one. I was narrowing down my search.

What sold me on Learn Python the Hard Way was looking at the Table of Contents: The book is organized into a series of coding exercises. I browsed the book's Introduction, and was pleased to discover that the book was written using the Direction Instruction teaching method. Direct Instruction is the method we used to teach our daughter how to read, and it's the preferred teaching method in all the best schools. The reason is because it really works. It breaks a subject down into small sequential lessons in which each lesson builds incrementally upon the one preceding it. By the end of a full set of lessons, students tend to absorb material better and retain it for longer than any other teaching method. Direct Instruction can be a little boring, and the first lessons are often the most difficult -- hence the name "...the Hard Way." But if one persists in this kind of instruction, one stands to gain more than any other competing instructional technique.

So here we have small, incremental changes that add up to major successes in the long run. If this sounds familiar to you, it's because I've blogged about it before. In fact, I write about it all the time. The other day, I wrote about how I was using this approach to modify my current running regimen. More to the point, I wrote a blog post six years ago entitled "Incremental Fitness," that quickly laid out the general idea. The truth is, over the years, I've discovered that the absolute best way to improve your fitness is to stick to a fundamentally sound routine while making small changes to it week-by-week or month-by-month. This ensures that the body has enough time to adapt to new exercises and improve upon them, without ever gaining so much efficiency that fitness improvement is sacrificed to mastery of technique.

Then there's music. I've been keen to improve my guitar technique. I'm pretty fast, but I'm not the kind of player I'd like to be. I'm not the kind of player who can take an interesting passage or lick and play it comfortably with tone and feeling as soon as I think it up. I stumble through a lot of what I want to play. I play well enough to impress laypeople, but not enough to impress fellow players. I want to change that. To that end, I picked up a book recommended by Dweezil Zappa (I think), called Guitar Aerobics by Troy Nelson. Again, the idea here is very simple: One lick per day, every day, for 365 consecutive days. The licks increase in difficulty week by week until, by the end of a year's time, one will have hopefully improved his playing dramatically. Best of all, the time commitment to these practice sessions is minimal. I can work my way through each lick a number of times and still have a little time left over to practice or write my own material. All the while, I'm becoming a better player, day by day.

I've applied the incremental approach to personal finance, stowing away daily, weekly, and monthly amounts of money, based on certain criteria, and funnelling that money into a diversified set of savings and investment instruments. I also stopped buying things that I wanted outright, and instead created a dedicated account for my own personal entertainment expenses. This account grows by a miniscule amount, but it grows every day, and within just a few short weeks it was easy to learn the fundamental lesson here: It doesn't take very much money to add up quickly if you save it consistently.

You don't have to clean every room in your house on "chore day." All you really need to do is commit to spending just five minutes cleaning the house each day. That will add up, and if it doesn't solve your clutter problem, add a sixth minute. Big deal. I don't know what the magic number is for you; maybe it's seven, eight, ten, or fifteen minutes. Whatever it is, it's a small and doable number for you to use to incrementally clean your home, rather than relying on a large and unpleasant house-cleaning project.

Again and again, the lesson presents itself in every conceivable context. If you want your life to get a lot better, don't try to work through a major catharsis. Forget about "new year, new you" and all such nonsense. What works better than anything is to simply identify one small thing that can be slightly improved, make a tiny (but permanent) change to that one thing, and then continue on about your day. Changes like this, made consistently over time, will eventually result in your whole life being better.

I call this approach Incrementalism. It's not a revolutionary idea, and I'm not the first person to have thought of it. But it does have the power to revolutionize your life, and if reading about it here gives you an idea to improve your situation in some small way, that's a good thing. 

Paradoxically, Culture Is Preserved By Impurity

I seldom speak Bangla around other Bangla speakers.

The reason for this is quite simple. I've been exposed to the Bengali language for more than a decade now. I know far more Bangla than people realize, and more importantly, when I choose to use a word, I know I'm using the right word and pronouncing it accurately enough that a reasonable person should be able to understand despite my accent. Despite this, however, every time I use a Bangla word with a Bengali speaker, they make a big production of saying, "Whaaaaat???"

At first, I thought it was my problem. Perhaps I used the wrong word, or pronounced the correct word very badly. As time went on, though, I realized that I was doing just fine. So, I tried a new approach: when people ask me, "Whaaaaat???" I now say nothing and simply wait. Invariably, without my even so much as hinting at what I had just said, my interlocutors suddenly, magically decide they know what I said.

How can I interpret this? One interpretation is that they're just being hard on me in an effort to get me to improve my Bangla. If so, their approach isn't working; rather than improving my Bangla, I'm simply discouraged from speaking. This brings me to a second interpretation: they don't really want me to speak Bangla.

Whatever the true interpretation might be, the fact of the matter is that Bangladesh is a small country, the greater Bengal region is not all that much bigger, and no one outside of Bengalis themselves speak Bangla. As the world's languages consolidate to only a handful, Bangla is becoming an increasingly irrelevant language on the international stage. When the language goes, so too will important Bengali cultural artifacts like poetry, music, and art; to say nothing of Bengali history and philosophy. Language is the doorway to culture. If that doorway remains tightly shut, outsiders will never be able to experience Bengali culture.

This closed-door approach to language might seem protective from an insider's perspective. Bangladeshis did, after all, fight a literal war to protect their language. I can understand how important the language is from a cultural perspective. Thus, I see why Bangla is a language worth saving from extinction.

The only question is: Is this the right way to save a language?

*        *        *

English is, for all intents and purposes, the language of the world. Everyone knows English. Where business is to be conducted, it is conducted in English. Where politics is to be done, it is done in English. Peppering one's speech with English words and phrases is very much a status symbol or a power play in many cultures today. All the best music and movies are English-language music and films. How did English, of all languages, become the de facto language of the world?

While I'm sure the British Empire and the 20th Century rise of the United States as an economic power had a hand in this, it's not sufficient to explain the whole story. There must be a better explanation. Well, here's a theory...

Although English does have rules, everyone breaks those rules and nobody cares. For many, breaking the rules of the English language is expressive of their individual cultures. Every part of the English-speaking world has some unintelligible version of English, and for the most part, English speakers don't care. Nobody gets upset at a Southerner speaking like a Southerner. Nobody cares when a Newfie says Newfie things. Nobody bursts a vein upon hearing Caribbeans speak like Caribbeans. For the most part, we English speakers find such regionalisms charming or quaint.

Likewise, when immigrants speak English poorly, nobody really cares. It's true that some people get mad about the fact that some immigrants don't bother to learn English, but nobody gets mad when an immigrant makes a good, solid effort at speaking the language, no matter how poorly they speak it. I just saw an old European lady make conversation with the cashier in the grocery store yesterday. Was she Russian? Hungarian? I don't know. I couldn't hardly make out what she was saying. But, between the two of them, the cashier and the old lady made themselves understood and had a pleasant exchange. This is emblematic of all such exchanges I've ever encountered.

In short, English-speakers cut each other serious slack when it comes to speaking English. Only a real jerk corrects someone else's speech in the middle of talking to them. The rest of us just let things slide.

The impact of this is that it enables new English-speakers to learn the language in the context of safety. They can screw up, because no one bites their head off for screwing up. It's not like France, where people will stop talking to you if you botch your French. In the English-speaking world, people are allowed to make mistakes with the language. It's fine.

This encourages people to learn and practice English.

Does it come at a cost? Yes. The cost is that English isn't a very pure language. We get our vocabulary from virtually every other language on Earth, we add new slang terms to the dictionary every year, most of us have really noticeably bad grammar, and our best cultural output tends to be pop music and pop film, rather than, you know, LITERATURE.

In short, we give up the purity of our language, but what we get is pervasiveness. English is everywhere precisely because we don't invest a lot of energy gatekeeping people about what's allowed in the language. We overlook people's mistakes and we readily allow outside influence into our mother tongue.

Not so with Bangla.

*        *        *

Interestingly enough, there are aspects of English-speaking culture that are incredibly closed. The two that come most readily to mind are: (1) British aristocracy and (2) American conservative, white, male-centric culture. Is it any surprise that these are the two cultural artifacts of the English-speaking world that are dying off the quickest and most completely in today's world?

Both of these micro-cultures are closed to outsiders. Both fiercely protect their special in-group language. Both have steep barriers to entry. And both are quickly becoming culturally irrelevant.

Now, whether you think this irrelevance is a good thing or a bad thing is a matter of opinion, and quite beside the point. The real point is simply that it is no surprise that the most closed aspects of any culture are the ones that eventually disappear from the face of the Earth. If you want to preserve your culture, you have to open it up to outside influence. This definitely means that your culture will change noticeably; and maybe you don't want that. But what's worse -- a culture that changes over time, but lasts forever; or a culture that remains perfectly pristine, but disappears?

Those who wish for their culture to be preserved should take notice of the fact that only by accepting outside influence can a culture persist. Otherwise, it simply disappears. This is natural, isn't it? Those who want to shut outsiders out of the culture must accept that the culture will only appeal to an increasingly small number of people, all the way to oblivion. You may have wanted the outsiders to stay out, but if you don't let them in, there will be nothing left to  preserve.

Funnily enough, the Hutterites learned this lesson very well. Their numbers and gene pools shrunk so drastically that they were forced to recruit outsiders, famously offering them lucrative land deals in order to join the colonies. As far as I know, that practice is still going on. It has to, otherwise Hutterites, too, will disappear.

Cultures only survive if they indiscriminately accept outsiders.

Inherently Good

Some people say that something is inherently good. For example, knowledge is often said to be inherently good, good for its own sake and for no other reason. It is better to know something than not to know it, because just expanding your mind and your knowledge is good. Just because.

I am skeptical of this view. In fact, I can't think of a single good thing in the universe that is merely inherently good. Every good thing I can think of is good for a particular reason. Food is good because it keeps me alive; producing more food is good because it keeps more people alive. Love is good because it produces positive feelings in human beings that can be reproduced time and time again by mere exposure to the object of that love; and, because it binds human beings into a cohesive society, which itself is good because it helps human beings achieve more of their individual goals than they could ever achieve alone. As for knowledge, any knowledge that can be called good is good because it helps people figure out how to solve their problems, remove their disutility, and so on.

Suppose something were inherently good, and not good for any other reason. How would we know that this thing is good? We couldn't look at any tangible benefits provided to us by the inherently good thing, because then we would be tempted to say that it is a good thing because of those benefits, and not because of the inherent nature of its goodness. How would we differentiate that thing's inherent worth for something that is inherently bad, but likewise has no tangible impact on our lives? That is, by what standard could we call the thing good?

Well, by no standard at all, because standards are external. Standards aren't inherent, they're imposed on a comparison from the outside, based on some list of criteria. Usually those criteria are tangible if not physical. Good things produce good feelings, at the bare minimum, and do so reliably.

The most likely explanation for the inherent goodness of a thing is that it reliably produces good feelings, despite producing pretty much nothing else.

Suppose I draw a picture of a cartoon cat, for example, and I think the cat is cute. Maybe just looking at this cat produces nice feelings. I didn't otherwise gain anything from the drawing; it didn't improve my drawing ability, it actually cost me money in terms of paper and ink resources, it cost me time to produce, and because I drew it in my own private office, no one will see it. It's also unlikely that I'll ever tell anyone about the cat drawing I made, that I enjoy. Is this an inherently good thing?

Actually, no. It's not "inherently good," because in order to enjoy my cat picture, I have to spend some time looking at it, or at least thinking about it and remembering what it looks like. The time I spend looking at or remembering my cat picture is a diversion from some other task. In other words, it's leisure time. Maybe other people prefer playing the flute in their leisure time, or going swimming, or having a snack, or playing a game, or any number of other things. But whatever else anyone does, they're spending their time on leisure, and when I look at my cat picture, so am I.

Some would say that spending too much time on leisure is wasteful, but I don't know anyone who would claim that leisure serves no practical or tangible purpose. It serves many purposes, from giving our brains and bodies time to relax between more strenuous physical or metal tasks, to generating social conversation and thus strengthening social bonds, to helping us prepare for a good night's sleep. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, so Jack needs to invest at least part of his time in leisure activity.

My point is that I cannot think of a single thing that is inherently good, but not good for some other reason. And this, to me, suggests that there is no such thing as "inherent goodness." Anything worth being called good has some sort of tangible benefit to someone. Otherwise, it's not really good.

What Makes Someone A Runner?

I've been working my way through the book 26 Marathons: What I Learned About Faith, Identity, Running, and Life from My Marathon Career by Eritrean-American running legend Meb Keflezighi. It is a wonderful book, and I highly recommend it.

In one of the early chapters, Keflezighi recounts the story of how, as the American record-holder in the 10,000 meters and an Olympic silver medalist in the marathon, with a personal best marathon time of 2:10, he mentions to someone he meets that he is a marathon runner. The other person asks him if he's ever run the Boston Marathon, and if so, what was his time? At that point, however, Keflezighi had never run the Boston Marathon, and had to answer accordingly.

He says that this experience taught him that people measure a runner's ability by how well they ran the Boston Marathon, and not much else. This section of the book should resonate with most runners, and certainly resonated with me. Nobody cares much about how fast a runner runs, or what races they've won. They don't even care what records they hold.

All the general public knows about distance running is the Boston Marathon. For that reason, some people (not Meb Keflezighi, of course) treat the Boston Marathon less like a race and more like a declaration of identity. Anybody can run, but only special people run the Boston Marathon. If you run the Boston Marathon, you can be special, too. The Boston Marathon is a "thing."

It's a foreign concept to me, because I grew up at a time when running was still very much a competitive sport. "What is your best marathon time?" was always a more relevant question to me than "Have you done the Boston Marathon?" All my friends were running the Salt Lake City Marathon and the Top of Utah Marathon, both of which take place at elevations exceeding 4,000 feet. If you can post a sub-three-hour marathon time in a marathon like that, does it really matter what happens in Boston?

*        *        *

At age 23, I entered a very difficult race. Held in the middle of summer, the course ran across the unique topography of the Canadian prairies. There, "coulees" are essentially what those of us raised near mountains would call "foothills," except where foothills go up, coulees go down. Other than that, it's quite similar: single-track trails over rolling hills, surrounded by bushes and short trees, inhabited by rabbits and coyotes.

Having run 20 to 30 miles quite frequently for several years, the 20-mile distance of this race didn't bother me at all. I was looking forward to a strong finish. When I started the race, however, I discovered a few unfortunate things. First of all, the hot weather was insufferable. I had no idea that Canadian summers could be so hot. Second, I had a breakfast misstep when I ate a vegetable omelet featuring a large portion of peas. Peas and distance running are a poor combination. Owing mainly to these two factors, I ran poorly that day.

I also discovered a third thing, however: "Adventure races" suck.

I didn't quite realize that I had made this discovery at the time, however. It took me another couple of years, when I participated in the relay category of an event called The Canadian Death Race. In the Canadian Death Race, individual competitors must run 125 kilometers through the Canadian Rocky Mountains. I joined up with a relay team featuring relative running novices. As the expert runner of the group, I took on the second-longest, but most physically strenuous leg of the race. I don't quite remember how long my leg was, but it started at the valley floor and went straight up the side of a 10,000 foot mountain to the summit, then back down the other side.

To my great surprise, my leg of the race did not follow along the usual hiking trail up the mountain. Normal hiking trails use "switchbacks." Basically you hike diagonally upward for a while, and then "switch back," meaning you walk back the other direction, but still upward. Like this:

This helps relieve the physical exertion required to travel straight uphill for miles at a time. It's also more eco-friendly, helping to avoid soil erosion and to prevent avalanches. In the Canadian Death Race, however, the course bypassed the switchbacks and instead cut a course straight up the side.

I get it. It's more difficult to run up a mountain that way. But it's also damaging to the eco-system, and it's also not very fun. Running up switchbacks is one of the most exciting things a trail runner can do. It's exhilarating to zig-zag up a large mountain, every twist and turn revealing more of the summit as you get closer. The athlete gets a beautiful view of the valley below on one side of the trail, and the summit on the other side. There are fun trees, rocks, and streams to jump over. It's the kind of trail that people get into trail running for in the first place.

What surprised me even more than the race course, however, was learning that none of the other race participants ran the uphill sections of the course. Only me! Everyone else walked the uphills and ran on the flat or downhill sections of the course.

That was when I realized that ultramarathon "running" was not really about running at all. You don't brag about your finish time when you run the Canadian Death Race. You brag about making it to the finish line along with everyone else. Even though "finishing" means walking up every hill and stopping to eat pizza at the rest stations (yes, I literally saw people eating pizza as they competed in the Death Race), no one is keeping track of whether you ran fast or stayed healthy all day. You're there to just finish, and everyone who crosses the finish line is exactly the same, no matter how fast or slow they did it.

*        *        *

In hindsight, this period in time was really the dawn of the adventure racing world. There were no "Spartan Races," and there was no such thing as "Obstacle Course Racing." Hell, crossfit hadn't even been invented yet. With the internet's help, people gained exposure to adventure races and ultramarathons, and it soon became a "thing," just like the Boston Marathon is a "thing." Before I knew it, people were asking me whether I'd ever done a Spartan Race. No, I'd said, What's that? Then they'd send me links of people rolling around in the mud and climbing ropes and carrying around bags of sand. None of the websites listed winners and finishing times. Silly Ryan, that wasn't the point.

In social situations, people would learn I was a runner. "Really!? Me, too!" I'd prepare myself for the kind of conversation I was used to having with my fellow runners: a conversation about nutrition, or effective training, or weekly mileage, or maybe personal records. Over time, these conversations disappeared from the running community and were replaced by eager questions about whether I'd done any Spartan Races.

I didn't feel left out, I felt frustrated. How do you tell somebody that you like to run 30-mile mountain summit trails carrying only a water bottle and a sandwich baggie full of peanuts, and that you do this weekly, when they want to talk to you about burpees? I do burpees, too, of course, but not as part of a race.

The problem is that the whole concept of running excellence transformed. It went from being about fast times, long distances, freedom, and solitude, to being about a cultish community of people who walked all the uphills and only ran in order to transport themselves from Challenge A, a giant mud puddle, to Challenge B, the monkey bars.

I used to run through rivers on my long runs all the time. It wasn't a thing. Monkey bars definitely weren't a thing. But now they are.

*        *        *

The benefit of a thing, however, is that it is testament to your identity. If you run a Spartan Race, you get to take your photo on that podium thing, with the Spartan Race logo behind you. Same with the Boston Marathon. Same, for that matter, with climbing Mount Everest.

At about the same time these mud-and-monkey-bar races were getting started, Kilian Jornet was winning every European trail race that mattered, and setting records along the way. by his early twenties, he had achieved everything he ever wanted to achieve with running. He experienced a brief depression as a result of having lived his dreams so young and still having so much life ahead of him. Then, he turned to mountaineering.

He tells this story in the movie Kilian Jornet: Path to Everest. Jornet began his running career as a competitive athlete, and eventually transitioned to trail racing. Once he was the undisputed champion, though, he needed something more than mere competition to drive him. So, he thought about it and decided on a list of mountains he wanted to summit.

He didn't just want to summit them, however. He wanted to summit them using his style, running up the mountain with minimal equipment, and then quite often skiing back down. Like an alpinist. There was no one else out there doing this at the time, so there was not much competition involved. Sure, he set some records in terms of how fast a person can reach a summit and come back down, but over the course of Jornet's movie and his "Summits of My Life" project, he learns that competition and speed isn't really the point.

Admirably, Jornet moved to Norway, to a relatively rural part of the country, where he could spend his days climbing mountains, skiing, and enjoying the outdoors. He mentions in the movie that in Norway the mountains don't have names, so he doesn't know which peak he's climbing, except that he's climbing it, and he's enjoying himself.

Other than the occasional social media post and Strava upload, no one is really keeping track of which peaks he climbs and how fast he's doing it. Again, it's not a competitive thing. He's doing it for himself, for fun, and to enrich his soul.

While Kilian Jornet shares a lot in common with the average runner at the Canadian Death Race, the difference is unmistakable. The Death-Racers are driven by a desire to say they are Death-Racers. It's about identity. It's about the photos, and the medal at the finish line. People who finish the Boston Marathon want mostly to be able to say that they ran and finished the Boston Marathon, and are thus "marathoners." Kilian Jornet just wants to spend some time in the mountains. If not for his sponsorships, he might not even care that anyone knew what he was doing. It's not a thing for him.

*        *        *

There is an important distinction to be made here. I'm sure if you asked Kilian Jornet why he does what he does, he'd give you an answer similar to the one you'd get from Meb Keflezighi, which is an answer similar to the one I give people when they ask me why I run so much. Why do it? Why get up at 4 A.M. and run around the neighborhood? What am I training for? Have I run the Boston Marathon? Have I ever done a Spartan Race? Why did I bike 37 miles on a single-speed bicycle in the dark, before breakfast, even though I was tired? 

Jornet, Keflezighi, and people like them will likely tell you that they do what they do because it's just what they do. It's a part of them. It's who they are. Running is certainly a major part of who I am. I am compelled to run; there isn't much choice in the matter. I do what I do because I'm me, and this is what the person who is me does. If I didn't do it, I wouldn't be me any longer.

So, if my identity is so wrapped up in running, how is this any different than a person who runs the Boston Marathon for reasons of identity? 

It comes down to the direction of causality. Running is an element of being who I am. I am who I am, and therefore I run. It's no different than the fact that, when my daughter comes home from school, I know she will flash me a mischievous grin and say or do something silly to make me laugh. This is inevitable, there is little doubt that it will happen, because it's an indelible part of who she is, like right- or left-handedness. Running does not cause me to be me. Being me causes me to run. 

Compare that to the runner who does not even know how to talk to other runners, except about the Boston Marathon. If these folks don't run the Boston Marathon, or at least try to, then they scarcely consider themselves to be runners at all. If the Boston Marathon were cancelled indefinitely, these folks would have no other reason to run, at least until some other running event took Boston's place as The Thing That Runners Do. And all that matters is doing it, not doing it fast or doing it twice or anything else. The causality here goes the other way: Running causes them to be who they are.

In the same way, a running the Canadian Death Race causes someone to be a Death-Racer, and running a Spartan Race causes someone to be an Obstacle Course Racer. There is no identity without the event; the event causes the identity. Running up a mountain doesn't make a person an "ultramarathoner," even if they do it many times and up many mountains. You have to bypass the switchbacks and run through the mud pit. There must be photos and a finisher's medal. Only then are you who you say you are.

*        *        *

So much of what we do today is geared toward external recognition. The marketing teams behind the things we value have every incentive to make us think that way, too. Certainly more people will pay to run a Spartan Race if it is understood to be the only way to claim that they're true Spartans. The Boston Marathon is more financially lucrative than the Top of Utah Marathon precisely because it serves as the external validation of a runner's ability to run. 

Aside from the marketing teams, however, it's not clear to me who benefits from this mentality. Maybe there are people out there who truly aren't satisfied by their running ability until they qualify and run the Boston Marathon. But how much happier would they be if they didn't feel obligated to cross an experience off of a list in order to enjoy running? 

A person ought not have to fight in order to be who they are. Nobody who loves chocolate has to fight for the title of "chocolate lover." All you have to do to be a chocolate lover is love the chocolate that you eat. Wouldn't it be interesting if that's how we defined runner's, too? You're a runner if you run. You run? Great, you're a runner.

I've actually had that conversation many times. I discover that someone I know likes to run, I strike up a conversation with them about it, and they quickly try to temper my expectations. "I don't run like you, Ryan. I'm not fast. I only run at 10:00 per mile pace. I've never done a marathon. I just like to go out for a run after work every other day."

When I hear this kind of thing, I say to people, "You run three to four times per week? That sounds like you're a runner to me!" In reality, such people deserve the title of "runner" far more than someone who plasters their social media accounts with race photos. They do it because they want to. That makes them runners.

Frank Meza And Ideal States

In April, I blogged about the website MarathonInvestigation.com.

It seemed so strange to me that ordinary people would cheat in road races, even with nothing on the line. For example, some people cheat just to be able to say they finished a race; they're not good runners, and they're not earning a top place, not even in their age group. Others cheat just so that they can "qualify" for the Boston Marathon, as though running the Boston Marathon itself is the accomplishment, not qualifying for it in the first place. Others cheat for no other reason than to collect their finisher's medal and have their photo taken at the finish line. Such small stakes, and yet people will cheat.

It also seemed strange to me that so many people would become emotionally invested in the fact that other people cheat for meaningless accomplishments. Don't get me wrong, I'm against cheaters, but I cannot fathom the mindset of a person whose hobby it is to pore over GPX files and race photography in search of evidence of cheating. In my spare time, I like to actually run, rather than prove that someone else didn't run. Or, I like to play music, or kiss my wife, or play with my daughter, or go on a bike ride, or do literally anything other than trying to figure out if some Instagram poster actually finished the race she claims to have run.What an odd hobby.

Well, the latest scandal in the world of cheating at road races is the strange case of Dr. Frank Meza, or Mezza, a retired physician and boys track coach, who was recently disqualified from the Los Angeles Marathon. Here's an LA Times article that neatly summarizes things. I won't rehash the whole thing here, but the basic synopsis of it is that Meza has spent the last ten years posting increasingly better marathon times while running one marathon about every three months! That's astounding in its own right, and his most recent time - the time for which he was disqualified - was an age division world record. No 70-year-old had ever run as fast as that before. Of course, the best evidence suggests that Meza cheated, not only in the most recent LA Marathon, but also in many previous marathons over the years.

People will naturally have a wide variety of reactions to this. In my reading of internet comments, I have found the overwhelming majority of people seem to be either outraged that a man would cheat at all - and the more you cheat, the more terrible a person you are - and smug gloating over the fact that Meza was finally caught.

To be perfectly honest, I cannot understand either of these reactions. I think cheating is wrong, and I think low-level cheating of the sort that Frank Meza is alleged to have done is pitiful. To waste anger on such a pitiful thing is, to me, equally pitiful. How pitiful must a person be to squander time and emotional energy on being angry at some loser for cheating his way to the top of 70-year-olds? And to gloat over something so pitiful is... really nasty. It's pathetic to revel in someone else's shame; and the more pitiful that person is, the more we debase ourselves by reveling in their downfall.

Have these people no dignity? It's understandable to want a cheater to be caught and to be passionate about doing the right thing, but when you see someone like Frank Meza - who is by all accounts an upstanding member of his community and a good mentor to young Latino boys - hit rock-bottom in such a pitiful way, the time for gloating is over. In the end, Meza's downfall is sad, not satisfying. What kind of person would be satisfied by that at all?

Although I can't locate the link now, one of the stories I read about Meza included some quotes from the current world marathon record holder for Meza's age group. He said it would be too bad if Meza cheated, because he was looking forward to racing against him. That's a healthy perspective. It's disappointing that Meza cheated, if that's what happened, and it's sad that it all came to this. Sad and disappointing, not outrageous or satisfying.

During times like these, it's elucidating to ask oneself, "What would the ideal resolution of this look like?" Many commentators on the Meza case hope that Meza is banned, panned, reviled, and that he just goes away. But I don't think that's an ideal resolution.

In my ideal world, Frank Meza would train hard and try to post a great marathon time. Maybe he'd come close to the times he's been posting. Maybe not. Maybe he'd find that running a genuine marathon is more satisfying than cheating. In my ideal world, Meza would humbly attempt to regain his dignity, the running community would forgive him, stop gloating, stop making a spectacle of him, and we'd all go on about our lives - happily.

What surprises me about all of this is that for many people, the ideal resolution to a situation like this is one in which a lot of people still feel really badly.

Meaning-Gaps

Meaning is broadly one of the hardest things to express to other people. I can tell you about how I give my daughter ten cents for every new thing she tries and for every difficult task she attempts. I can tell you about how happy this makes her, and about how she subsequently seeks out opportunities to try new things or difficult things in order to earn her dimes. And, I can tell you about the other day, when my wife decided to try something new for dinner, and in response, my daughter said, "Mom, you can have one of my dimes because you tried something new." You'll kind of get it. But the total meaning of all this will forever escape you. On an intellectual level, you'll understand why I'm so proud of my daughter for internalizing the value of trying new things and reaching out to the rest of us to award us for our own mini-accomplishments. On an emotional level, though, it won't hit you.

I guess you had to be there.

Someone I know was talking to a friend about how accomplished she felt when she finally reached the point in her career when she was earning a six-figure salary. Her friend dismissed the idea, saying essentially that "everybody" earns six figures these days. That plainly isn't true, but even if it were, it represents a failure to understand another person's accomplishments. Or perhaps her friend did understand the accomplishment, but failed to understand the meaning of the accomplishment. She wasn't bragging about her salary, she was expressing gratitude for her good fortune in life. Reaching a six-figure salary, for her, meant achieving a certain station; it's a mark of internal validation, not a mark of external validation. It has little to do with who else has achieved the same thing.

I have most often encountered this disconnect in the reverse. I'll run a road race or something, maybe snag a top age-group finish, and my friends will do their best to congratulate me on an amazing accomplishment. How can I express to them that, when it comes to running, I already achieved much more than that two decades ago and that "second place in my age group at the Podunk Days 5K Fun Run/Walk" is not something I'll remember next week, much less twenty years from now? How do I explain that what would be highly significant if my friends did it is not particularly significant when I do it?

Moreover, how do I explain to people that their making a big deal about what to me is not a significant accomplishment detracts from my real purpose at the fun run? I wasn't there to earn a place or an award, I was there to join the rest of the community in a fun run. I may have been there to see what kind of time I could get at the race, to check my overall level of fitness or the state of my training. The age group awards are for people who care about that sort of thing, and I'd much rather forego an age group medal so that someone who is really trying can get the recognition they deserve. I'm not ungrateful, but I also don't want accolades for something carries no meaning for me.

In the end, it's a meaning-gap. What means a great deal to one person might not mean very much to the next person. It might be a loving exchange between a father and a daughter, a personal accomplishment that you're trying to share with a friend, or an accidental accomplishment you never wanted or sought out. Humans thrive on meaning, we each seek it out in our own way. The act of recognizing someone else's meaning is an act of empathy, a bridge to human emotional connection. Whether we're on the giving end or the receiving end, we long for that meaning to be reflected back at us by the other people with whom we interact. In many ways, meaning is love, and its absence is a type of rejection.

There will often be meaning-gaps between us. This is unavoidable. We can keep our relationships healthy, however, by trying to recognize the meaning that other people see in the world, trying to experience it from their perspectives, and expressing that recognition back to them, to the best of our abilities. 

Nihilistic Accelerationism

The currently favored meme among "shitposting" alt-righters is "clown world." That sentence is packed with references that will be unknown to many, and obsolete in a year, so let's briefly unpack it.

"Shitposting" refers to the practice of making largely unserious and frequently irreverent social media posts that one wouldn't necessarily want one's family or professional colleagues to see. For example, if I wanted to inundate the world wide web with pictures of the "circle game," my family would quickly grow tired of the gag, and my colleagues would think I was puerile. But, if I create an alternate social media profile, calling myself "RyLo Ken" or something, then I can post as many lame "circle game" pictures as I want to. Voila. Shitposting. Some people post inflammatory political content on their "shitposting account," some post lots of dad jokes, some post other dumb things.

Alt-righters are an ambiguous lot of people. They are predominantly of a conservative or right-wing political bent, but where the traditional right-winger is pretty serious about traditional, conservative morality (e.g. religious-based morality and straight-laced social presentation), alt-righters are essentially reverse-accelerationists. They have come to embrace the worst aspects of fringe left-wing culture in hopes of exaggerating it and hastening its ultimate demise. The classic alt-right example of this is overt racism: alt-righters start by embracing left wing notions of identity politics and intersectionalism, and then apply those theories to white males, resulting in white supremacy. It's not clear to me whether the alt-right's point is to literally embrace white supremacy or to simply use white supremacy as a means of making identity politics so intolerable to the left that identity politics are ultimately defeated. If the alt-right were to openly state that their embrace of identity politics is all an accelerationist ruse, that would render the point moot. So the world must unfortunately wait to see whether the alt-right was ever serious about white supremacy.

This brings us to "clown world," a series of memes in which Pepe the Frog (and anyone else, really) is depicted wearing a red clown nose and a rainbow wig. I think the original clown world pictures were just intended as ambiguous jokes. I went down the rabbit hole on this a bit, and it seems like the original clown world picture was simply posted with an open-ended question, "How does this make you feel?" That makes "clown world" kind of funny. Unfortunately, since the picture involved both Pepe the Frog, which has been used in various racist ways, and rainbow colors, which are emblematic of the LGBTQ pride movement, you can guess where "clown world" eventually went.

All of this represents a sort of mean-spirited cynicism. It's one thing to troll the overly earnest, cause them to clutch a few pearls for some laughs, and then move on with your day. (I don't condone that, either, but it is at least somewhat forgivable in a merry-prankster sort of way.) It's quite another to burn the Overton Window to cinders.

To put it simply, in order to buy into the alt-right's nihilism, one pretty much has to let go of everything: not merely all of your respect for other people, but even the notion that respect for other people itself is a virtue worth pursuing. Why else would you present yourself as maybe-a-nazi? It goes beyond promoting a set of ideas and into the realm of destroying the integrity of the notion of ideas. In other words, the project is not to win arguments and defeat ideas, but to eliminate the need for having an argument at all.

For a long time, I've been wondering why this sort of thing bothers me so much, and I think I finally have the answer. Ideas are, essentially, the conceptual equivalent of civilization.  Ideas are to humanity as personal relationships are to society. They are the foundation of advanced civilization, and if we're ready to give them all up - all of them, not just the bad ones, but all of them - then we are essentially giving up on civilization itself.

And you can easily recognize this in the alt-right. Their preference is for might-makes-right, and "alpha" behavior. They don't make heroes of Einstein or Feynman, they make heroes of Patton and Caesar. Warlords, generals, chieftains… This is the kind of civilization the alt-right is aiming at, and how could it be otherwise? The end of the road to nihilism is death, destruction and abnegation. You can't build a civilization on chiefs and strongmen. No one is strong enough to build a society, in fact. We need ideas for that.

Human society existed for eons as mere tribes of chiefs and strongmen; it wasn't until we started exercising temperance, restraint of force and passion and violence that we were able to climb out of mud hovels long enough to build a thatched roof; and from there, shingles, and sideboards, and so on. The brute could never have conceived of planting seeds and caring for them for months so that the tribe could be fed for a year. The brute couldn't conceive of it because the brute deals in force, not ideas. It required temperance to reach that realization, and temperance itself is an idea. Then, just as Mises describes in his writings on higher-versus-lower-order goods, each new development cleared the path for another, greater development; one technology building on the last and enabling the next. The wheel-and-axle is not just a physical technology, it's a template for how to build a machine. It is an idea.

Ideas are what build societies, and a society without ideas is a failed state. Therefore, nihilism is, in a way, the belief in a failed state. It's the belief that none of the things we believe in long enough to make the world a better place really matters. So nihilism can only ever produce an inferior world, and the longer we cling to it, the worse the world gets, all the way to the nadir.

And, frankly, that's why the alt-right will never win.

An Aesthetic Signal

There's a theory out there, presented variously throughout history, but most recently by Robin Hanson, that all or most human behavior is an attempt to achieve "status" through "signaling." So, for example, if get interested in photography, my main objective is to become a good photographer, which people will then perceive and thus award me social status. I only play guitar for the chicks, basically.

Of course, this is a perfectly plausible - perhaps even likely - perhaps even true - explanation of the behavior of some individuals. Because this theory is certainly true for some people and some actions and some situations, folks have a tendency to go all in on it. The problem with the theory is that it is unnecessarily reductive. Just because some of what I do aims at social status doesn't mean all of what I do is. Just because a lot of what I do aims at social status doesn't mean it is the best explanation for human behavior writ large.

There are many specific problems with this view of human behavior, and I couldn't possibly list them all here. But I got to thinking about one particular weakness of the theory over the weekend. That problem is: human social groups play a weaker role in our lives today than at any prior point in human history. Thanks to the highly individualizing social changes instigated by the internet, rampant marketing segmentation, and Western individualism, people are now less likely to engage in close social interaction. There is no big Saturday night party in today's world, as there was for previous generations. Many young people stay home, while many others prefer to spend their time with a small group of close friends, rather than the larger kind of in-group that would dole out social status.

Indeed, to achieve any significant kind of social status in today's world, one practically has to already possess it. No one is interested in artists or musicians who are not already famous, which is why so much of art marketing is designed to convince the public that a new artist is already a star. You probably couldn't mention any rising stars in the athletics world, either, unless you are already deeply invested in that athlete's team. The only businesspeople you could probably mention by name are those who are famous billionaires right at this minute, or those with whom you had the opportunity to work directly. Ethicists, academics, doctors? Forget it. You simply don't know these people by face or by name.

And that's the point: we might all be motivated to pursue social status, but in this day and age, none of us actually gets it. So, it's a poor explanation for human behavior.

What I have noticed that people do is choose, not an in-group, but an aesthetic. I tried to describe this in a recent post. If you consider yourself a "rocker," then you will generally adopt the "rock aesthetic," and likewise if you consider yourself a fitness buff or a bookish person or a scientist.

Many people who choose an aesthetic in this way often express opinions, but only when they are consistent with their chosen aesthetic. For example, you're more likely to hear about the importance of following the heart from someone who has chosen an artistic aesthetic than you are from someone with a rocker aesthetic, even though they both might believe it. You're more likely to hear about the importance of saving for retirement from someone with a "savvy business guy" aesthetic than you are from someone with a "rural farmer" aesthetic, even though they both live accordingly. These opinions are not so much about how people choose to live as they are memes that people express, especially on social media, to curate a chosen aesthetic.

Today, a lot of people are making impassioned statements about abortion. There is a group of people out there who are very invested in this debate, but the vast majority of people you see who express strong opinions on the abortion debate are not so heavily invested in the debate. Instead, they're presenting memes in support of their chosen aesthetic. A very religious person will post a pro-life meme, effectively informing others of their views on religion, not actually abortion. A person heavily invested in presenting themselves as a "liberal" will send out pro-choice memes for the same reason they send out climate change memes or memes about the homeless. It's not about the issues at all, it's about the aesthetic.

Separating the two concepts in their own minds is often quite impossible. Ask the average person if what they're saying is about the issues or about their general vibe, and he will most often say that of course it's about the issue; even if it's not. So, I don't recommend that you out people when they're engaged in aesthetic curation. I also don't recommend that you spend too much time debating the issues with them. After all, they're not interested in the facts. They're interested in what their memes tell others about their aesthetic. In other words, they're interested in presenting their identity, not their thoughts.

It's a lot easier to question someone's thoughts than it is to question their identity. Don't get confused; if someone is sharing their identity with you, it's not an invitation to debate.