Tag: Life

Musing on Connective Tissue

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Imagine 10 or 100 people describe you, and their descriptions become a word cloud. Now take your word cloud, and compare it to other people’s.

Would we find that the people you spend time with have similar word clouds — similar descriptors, similar nouns about them? Does your cloud sit close to the clouds of the people near you? If so, in what ways alike, and in what ways different? (That’s graphing friend groups or political links in n-dimensional space according to personal traits, as a word cluster of noun descriptors of the person: clustering by cloud similarity and then drawing lines between the points based on social or political ties.)

My bet: people befriend and connect based on proximity. But the friend network is different than the leader. The map of who we like is not the map of who leads us.

Maybe “Yalie” is a noun about you, and a bunch of the people around you are also Yalies. Maybe most of the people you spend time with are quite tall — about the same height. But what about groups with diversities of traits instead: An office might cluster around Yalies but diversify by role: one person described “HR,” one described “accounting,” one described “CEO.” Some friend groups are all CEOs; other circumstances produce diversity. How does that work in an office? In politics? 

I wonder what they’d learn about politics. Is the most successful politician of a group the person who overlaps most with the rest of the group? I wouldn’t think the leader is necessarily the person with the most words overlapping others (because that person might miss a key trait, e.g. the desire to lead). Maybe the person who is friends with everybody is the one with the most in common with everybody. Or maybe the leader’s lowest commonality is higher than anybody else’s lowest (i.e. “The leader is nobody’s stranger.”). It’s got to be more complicated than that, depending on the group structure and incentives and the outsized impact of specific traits like desire for power.

Why I’ve been thinking about this: in a group that I interacted with today, the leader shares the most traits with the other group members. Each bloc shares one of her dimensions. Thinking about the descriptors of these different people and how she ended up being president: she is the person all of these different groups can agree on.

But often the leader of a group is not the leader because they have much in common with everybody, but because they plan things. That’s an interesting difference. The leader of a friend group is not the one most overlapping with others but more likely the one who organizes the events. In her case, part of it is she makes the thing happen — the leadership thing. This differs from the second-in-command, who doesn’t organize people, just makes the wheels run. Doing isn’t organizing.

Does anybody map social groups this way? A thing I’d be curious about: how do the friend network and the leader differ? The mapping half is studied — sociologists call it homophily. The gap between who connects and who leads is the fresher question.

—

Games Played

The writers missed out by failing to name it, “The Devil Wears Prada 2: The Devil Still Wears Prada.”

The 12 Steps: Not Just for Addicts

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Why should addicts get all the healing? 

I went to an AA meeting once to see what the fuss was about. A friend was going and invited me along. (It turns out the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. I drank for a few years in college, then realized I didn’t like alcohol, so I came along as a member.) The meeting piqued my curiosity but didn’t resonate with me. 

A few years later, I attended another Anonymous meeting of a different type. (A different friend was going.) Then a third type, another few years later. 

It’s shocking to me that the most impactful solution we have to a whole family of physical addictions is psycho-socio-communal-spiritual. That is to say: Alcohol is physically addictive. Why does making amends with other people help heal that addiction? 

The best doctors don’t treat symptoms. They treat causes. Addiction is self-medication. Anonymous meetings and the 12 steps work on that level. 

I don’t buy that you have to do every step of the 12 steps in order. If order were mandatory, I wouldn’t do them at all. I think each step has a key trait (or traits) that, when satisfied, does the healing. Ben Franklin did a moral inventory before AA was ever invented. 

Today I started my step 4 personal inventory. I spent 45 minutes jotting up areas in my life in which I feel angry and unable to let that anger go. I’m “hung up on it”, as the kids in 1972 might say. 

This is to say I’ve admitted I have a problem (just not in that way). A set of problems. A set of regrets that pop into my mind and which cause me to psychologically spasm with deep and profound regrets. 

So, without any obvious addiction that’s sent me to rock bottom, I’d like to do the steps. Specifically step 4 and step 8. 

Step 4: “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” 

Step 8: “Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.”

I think that, to do step 8, I may also need to do part of step 5 (“Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.” [I’m not sure the God part is important. The self and other human may be.]) 

16 months ago, I noticed something I felt a profound regret about. I jotted up a letter to that person in an attempt to mimic these steps (well, technically sending the letter is step 9). I shot it their way. They responded positively. I feel much better now. 

Today, I took step 1. Er, step 4. I skipped step 1. I’ll be the first to admit that’s not a problem.

Don’t Mess with Transit 

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How Houston missed the bus. 

A man with a hand cast approaches Partner in the Houston light rail. He points at her and points at himself as if to say “we’re both injured!” 

His opening line: “are you a believer?” 

Partner grunts, “Catholic”. 

He tells her that Jesus will take care of her. See: he prayed and his hand doesn’t hurt. 

— 

Houston is a car-based city. The light rail only navigates along a few specific stretches. Therefore the main people who use the light rail are those who don’t have cars. The selection effects mean the light rail users are mainly poor or homeless. It’s the highest proportion of people talking to themselves or yelling arguments at the empty air that I’ve ever seen. 

So what? 

So it’s a little bit of a spiral to the bottom. The New York City subway definitely has more total homeless or poor or ghost-yellers than the Houston light rail. But the proportion in Houston dwarfs that of New York. And it feels – at least to me – much less safe.  I wonder whether that causes it to only attract those without other options. So it attracts fewer riders – and fewer affluent and influential riders. And therefore the service doesn’t expand? 

Houston doesn’t necessarily need a better light rail. The buses also work well enough, if you’re okay standing in oppressive heat for fifteen minutes. But it’s a notable trait of infrastructure: if you don’t invest early enough, you’re generally better off waiting for the next paradigm. The US is a car culture. Next up: personal helipads? 

—

And a funny quote from Partner: 

“You know what’s the funniest part of BTUs? The Brits don’t use air conditioning.” 

Brooklyn Communists

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The best part of Brooklyn? It’s near New York City. 

Partner & I trained for 48 minutes each way to an event in Brooklyn. 

The event: four fifteen-minute talks plus Q&A, starting at 5pm since we had to vacate the space ahead of a different event starting at 6:30pm. 

Partner & I arrived at 4:40. One of the organizers said, “You guys are early. Could you come back in 20 minutes?”[1] 

If you’re going to have four fifteen-minute talks, plus Q&A time, you really want to start near 5pm. See, I don’t know what they teach you in Brooklyn. But here in Manhattan, 4 x 15minute = 60 minutes. And 60 minutes = an hour. 

Instead, they didn’t start until 5:20pm because, as they said, “Some people are coming from work.” 

No duh. It’s Thursday. How did you not consider this? 

So the talks got squished to 10mins each. And the Q&A got squished to one chunk of ~8 minutes. 

And only two people put their shoes in the little cabinet despite the cabinet being labeled “put your shoes in this cabinet”. And yes, they were Me & Partner. 

—

The talks were on living in communal spaces. Partner and I are interested in living with friends. We want to raise a family alongside other families, ideally in the same apartment or neighboring. 

But, for us this trait is only one of our interests. For the people at this presentation, co-living is the main part of their identity. 

One of the recommended processes for co-living: have a roommate check-in. Include open dialogue so different housemates can share their problems. 

My problem: a poorly scheduled, structured, and run event. 

[1] Partner says they said, “You guys are incredibly early.” I didn’t hear the incredibly.

Performance-Enhancing Drugs Are Fundamentally Good

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Chemicals don’t care what you call them.

Performance-enhancing drugs are great. They enhance performance, and isn’t enhanced performance good? 

Look: today I felt grumpy. So Partner grabbed me a pearl tea: sugar, plus a substance the Olympics banned until 2004. Twenty minutes later I was up and rolling, knocking out work I’d been avoiding for three weeks. It got me thinking.

The classifications we give – food vs supplement vs medication vs drug vs illegal drug – are not chemically meaningful. If you eat the vitamin C that’s in an orange, that’s called eating an orange. If you take the same amount of vitamin C in pill form, that’s called taking a supplement. Yet we think about these very differently. The exact same chemical process that ten years ago was called doing drugs is now called “doctor-prescribed medication for sleep” (cannabis). 

Why does our society (all societies?) have these classifications? We want to restrict some behaviors: for the safety of others, for the safety of the individual, or for reasons that aren’t about safety at all.

The biggest not-about-safety category is purity: questions of what a human is, and what appropriate human behavior looks like. So what’s with the obsession with purity?

I’m reminded of a lawyer who built a Supreme Court practice by soliciting: He would identify cases the Court might take, contact the potential plaintiffs to inform them of their potential case, and end up arguing before the Justices. Chief Justice John Roberst pooh-poohed this: “If I’m going to have heart-bypass surgery, I wouldn’t go to the surgeon who calls me up.” 

But actually, wouldn’t you? Let’s run the thought experiment. A surgeon approaches you out of nowhere: “Based on the shape of your face, I know that you have obstructive sleep apnea. I’m a medical doctor. I studied at this school. I’m not some quack making things up: here are the rigorous scientific tests you can take to verify what I’m telling you. And get a second opinion, if you like.” I would think: that’s excellent.

In fact, this is roughly what happened to me before my jaw surgery. After six doctors’ worth of searching, I found Dr. Christian Guilleminault – one of the founders of the field of obstructive sleep apnea, since passed. While he hadn’t found me on the street, his diagnosis was as unsolicited as they come. He looked at my face and said: “I can tell by the shape of your face that you were a rambunctious child.”

What a funny thing to say! 

He followed it up with, “We will send you in for the lab tests, of course, but I already know what they will say.” He then predicted the results, which aligned perfectly when the tests came back a few months later. That’s the doctor I want to hire! 

So much of our restriction runs on purity. But purity is not itself good for the individual. Purity puts the individual into a particular game — a game they can win only by behaving in one specific way, and a game they never asked to play.

The purity game is about packaging. Take virginity, the archetype of purity: a woman who is chaste, who follows the virginal pathway, receives adulation for it. There are other pathways to adulation. Purity just happens to be the lowest common denominator (for women in a specific slice of society). 

I drastically prefer informed consent. The biggest danger with performance-enhancing drugs — with drugs, period — is the unknown unknowns. You have to know and understand not only the limitations of the drug itself, but the limitations of our knowledge about the drug. We do this poorly as a society, because much of a doctor’s job is to demonstrate confidence and instill calm. They act, one could fairly say, like a con man. The onus is therefore on you the patient to work out the actual epistemology of your circumstance. It is frequently much less certain than any doctor, drug manufacturer, or therapist would have you believe.

External games like purity are other people’s scoreboard. Informed consent is your own: you, the substance, and an honest approximation of uncertainty. To enhance performance, choose the right substances. To choose the substance, know the limits of what’s known.

Today I consented, informed, to one highly-caffeinated pearl tea. Three weeks of avoidance, cleared. Enhanced performance. Fundamentally good.

Top-Secret Games: The Bathroom Line

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The goal of the game is to pee. You pee by checking the doors.

(An accidental series. Part 1: Trader Joe’s, Part 2: Airports.)

At the World Cup final watch party at the Harlem Tavern, a woman waits in front of five bathroom doors. I ask: “Did you check them all?”

She says no.

I walk down the line, twisting each knob. At the third door, the knob turns. The door opens. I gesture to her to enter. She does.

What is wrong with people?

Hold that question.

On the screen, Argentina was busy demonstrating the opposite mistake. A ref draws a box, and you fill the box you’re given. Players will play as rough as you let them — and they should; that’s the correct way to play a game. Argentina filled its box and kept pushing at the sides: four yellow cards by my count, one of them on the coach, two of them on Enzo Fernández, who was sent off. They played the end of a World Cup final a man down. They did it to themselves. (For more on refs and the dark arts, see Drawing a Foul vs. Flopping.)

A bathroom line has no ref. That’s what makes it the purer game. Field notes:

The early exit. Leave before the hydration break is called, or the instant it’s called. This is playing within the rules. I left immediately and made the front of the line. Plenty of others made the same move; the line stacked up eight deep behind me.

The exit-door gambit. At the halftime of extra time, a man arrived, realized the line was a line, and was very much not into it. I watched him scan for a shortcut. Finding none, he circled around to the bathroom’s exit and went in from there. He checked whether any doors were open. He played off the visit by washing his hands — “I only came here to wash my hands, not to skip the line…” — and then stood inside, watching the doors, waiting for one to open. Cutting the line is breaking the rules, and watching it riled up a rule-enforcing Germanic part of me that wants to destroy him and everything he stands for. The rest of us waited in the line.

The empty stall. The line filed right past the accessible bathroom. On Partner’s previous bathroom visit, a dude next to her tried that door: empty. She immediately stood in front of that door, waiting for him to come out; someone else lined up behind her. Nobody had been using that bathroom, and somebody should be using the bathroom: seems like an efficient use of resources. But the second line forming back there was the wrong shape. It should be one line, feeding every door. (I have preached this queueing theology before, at Trader Joe’s.)

Which returns us to the woman and the five doors. Five doors, five knobs, all that information free for the twisting. She had checked none of them. Behind door number three: an empty room.

Check the doors.

How glorious it is to be a funcle

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To win, keep the game going. To keep the game going, drink what you’re given.

At 11:15am this morning, I asked my brother-in-law to set a 30-minute timer. I then sunscreened the tops of my feet and I entered the kiddie pool. My nephew (just shy of 2 years old) was playing squirt with my father. Squirt is played as follows:

  • One player (the toddler) hangs on the water squirter in the kiddie pool. Sometimes he moves.

That’s it. That’s the game. If you think that’s not a game, you’ve probably never played with a toddler.

Our next game was more active. My nephew rotated the water squirter to hit me. I flapped my arms up in the air and emitted a “wah!” noise reminiscent of Waluigi from the Nintendo games.

After water-squirter-based games, my nephew wrapped his arms around a beach ball, then tried to pelt me with it. He failed. He cackled. He chased it down. He repeated.

It was around this time that my sister (Nephew’s mother) said something to me from outside the pool. I asked her to repeat it. She said, “We’re not watching him”, implying I was in charge of this tiny tot’s life, surrounded by 9 inches of murder-liquid.

Whoa. Big responsibility.

Nephew found a truck. His truck. His dumptruck. He filled it with a green cup. He dumped it out. He repeated the cycle.

Finally, we struck upon the game of the day: Nephew fills the green cup with water, then holds it out for Funcle (me) to drink. Funcle mimes drinking the cup, using only his mouth (no hands!). Nephew cackles. Nephew fills the cup again. This time, Funcle grips the cup using his lips. He drops the cup with a “blah!” sound, imitating the sound of a blub-blub fish.

Repeat this game for 15 minutes.

You might think this game gets boring.

It does not.

At 11:45am, my brother-in-law told me my alarm had gone off, prompting me to check on Partner. I tagged in Oma to ensure the Nephew stayed safe, checked on Partner, and returned to the kiddie pool after learning Partner was on her way down.

The games continued.

Have you ever reminisced about something from a mere 9 hours ago?

How glorious it is to be a funcle.

Hermit Crabs & Kidney Donations

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A spoken-and-transcribed guest-post courtesy of Partner, who caught upwards of seven hermit crabs today: 

Hermit Crab Homes

Hermit crabs grow, but their shells don’t, because hermit crabs don’t grow their shells but find them. When a hermit crab grows too big for a shell, it will find a bigger one. If the bigger one is too big for that hermit crab, it will just hang out near the shell, in the hope that some other hermit crab will come take that bigger shell and leave behind its shell. Because of this, you can get a whole line of hermit crabs: several smaller hermit crabs are waiting to size up their shell. As soon as a bigger hermit crab comes and takes that too-big shell, it will free up a slightly smaller shell, and then another hermit crab could take that slightly smaller shell, etc., trickling down. 

It’s like the kidney donation chain. 

The Kidney Donation Chain

If I wanted to give you my kidney, but you and I are not a match, we’d be out of luck unless there were two other people, one of whom wanted to donate and the other to receive, and we were a reciprocal match so could swap. But generally, there are so many factors required for a kidney to fit that a direct swap is improbable. And they only let something like two or three people form a loop because they want to operate all at once. They’re afraid that, if they do them sequentially, the buddy of the first person to get a kidney will renege on his donation at the end of the loop because his incentive to give is gone. 

Because of this structure, someone donating the kidney without needing a kidney for a friend or family member can change that loop from a loop into a line, which is really mathematically beneficial. And the altruistic donor is just giving away the kidney, no one’s on the hook for getting a kidney back to them, so there’s no risk of someone chickening out. If you choose to donate your kidney, you can kick off a chain that doesn’t just help the one person you are donating your kidney to, but can actually help all the people who exist in that chain, which can be a dozen people or more. 

BBC Earth video on hermit crab shell swaps:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1dnocPQXDQ

Info on starting a kidney donation chain, including a way to get 5 loved ones to the top of the donation line if they ever need a kidney but you already gave yours away: https://www.kidneyregistry.com/for-donors/start-a-chain/

The Coupon Book

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The goal of the game is to make money. You make more money by giving some away, then charging for what stays scarce.

I’m at the second all-inclusive resort of my life. So why do I feel nickel-and-dimed?

(My family comes together for one of these every summer now, which is a lovely experience. I’m having a great time with great people. This feeling is not a particularly negative impact on my experience; I’m simply enjoying the process of analyzing it.) 

It started at check-in, when the concierge handed me a coupon book. He flagged one asterisk: the $50-off coupon for the resort store needs a purchase of at least $100. I laughed and noted I wouldn’t wouldn’t be using that one.

A coupon book. At an all-inclusive. The whole premise of the place is that I already paid, so nothing else carries a price. A coupon is a price dressed up in a faux discount. The coupon book is a store smuggled into a building labeled “no stores allowed”. 

* * *

Once I noticed the first coupon, I couldn’t stop. $50 off a single spa treatment, which made me wonder what a spa treatment costs. I found the menu advertised in the bar and scoffed: treatments start at $229. I can get an excellent massage in the US for half that, and that’s paying US labor prices, not whatever a masseuse earns in central america. 

This is couponing the Bed Bath & Beyond way: float the sticker high, then hand back a slice, so the discount feels like a gift instead of a markup you sidestepped. It’s comparison control, the price game I keep coming back to. Anchor the number at $229 and $50 off reads as generous. Nobody mentions the seller number that should orient their side of the price: their marginal cost of providing the service. 

And the asterisk gives that number away. The same way Chipotle running a 2-for-1 tells you a burrito nets more than 50%, this resort’s $50 off of $100 in the gift shop tells me the same. They’re not discounting into a loss on purpose. If they can afford to give it back, they were charging too much to begin with.

* * *

The second move is the paid upgrade, and it bothers me more, because it breaks the frame on purpose. (At this resort, that’s the “Star Class” upgrade: your room and food become slightly nicer, and you can book Star Class-exclusive dinner tables.) The whole reason to buy an all-inclusive is to delete the transaction. No prices on the menu, no small voice doing math at dinner. If I wanted the experience of paying for something nice, I would have booked a place where I pay for something nice. The upgrade sells me back the exact friction I paid to be rid of.

* * *

So why build it this way? Why sell “everything included,” then spend the week selling more?

My best guess: once everyone holds the same all-inclusive wristband, everyone wants the same scarce things. The 7pm table at the good restaurant. The shaded poolside chairs. Put a few hundred people on identical footing and they start competing, and anywhere people compete over something scarce, there’s money in tilting the field.

So the resort sells you a basic entry ticket. Then it sells weapons to both sides: the upgrade that jumps the dinner queue, the tier that reserves your chair before dawn. What you’re buying, on top of the vacation, is a position in a contest they built.

* * *

I don’t write any of this with a clenched jaw. I came here to stop running the numbers, and on a vacation the only points worth counting are relaxation, enjoyment, and connection. I’m racking those up, surrounded by people I love. I just can’t switch off the part of me that wants to see the machine.

And the machine is simpler than it looks. If something is free, someone finds the version of it that isn’t, and sells you that. If free, then freemium. Even here? Especially here.

You’re Excellent at Friendship

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To learn what you’re good at, ask other people. Even better, see what people pay you for.

Earlier today, I told a friend he’s excellent at friendship. He was surprised. He’d never thought of himself that way. He asked how I knew.

Here’s how: we’d just been talking about his bachelor party, a roomful of strong, eccentric personalities, every one a distinct weirdo, many of whom would never otherwise share a room. He gets along beautifully with all of them. Holding that many particular people close at once takes real skill. That skill is friendship. He has it without knowing.

This not-knowing is common. The people who are good at a thing are often the last to know it, because unmeasured skills are tough to compare. We can check the scored ones, though even there the ego cooks the books: somehow every poker player says they’re at the 75th percentile. The scoreless skills, friendship among them, keep no count we can read. So we stay blind to our placing within them.

Take the word “driven.” I have found the people who call themselves driven to be, more often than not, the lazy ones, using the word as a permit: “I’m usually such a hard worker, so I’ve earned a little time off.” The genuinely hard worker, meanwhile, tends to grind precisely because they’re convinced they’re too lazy. Their self-image points the opposite way from the truth. The person who repeatedly calls themselves happy is trying to convince someone, either themselves or others.

So most of us don’t know what we’re good at. We learn from outside, from what others reflect back, because the trait is relative and others judge it better than we do. The blindness runs deeper than skill: we can’t see our own traits, and those same traits decide both what we’re good at and what’s good for us.

This distinction gets even tougher when adding internal emotions: I’ve been turning this over today because two companies interviewed me. One piqued my interest immediately. The other, once I learned the details, is the better fit. It’s almost exactly what I’ve already done, less of a stretch. (“I’ve done all these pieces, just not in this precise combination”, I told them.) Being more drawn to the first isn’t evidence that it’s the better place for me. Being drawn to something is how marketing wins. My interest is one ingredient. When running the ikigai exercise, “what do I love?” is one question out of four. Love is helpful. It isn’t the whole answer. Yes, everyone needs passion. But passion can’t buy food. 

Here, what I’m good at aligns with what’s good for me, but they’re disconnected from what I’m drawn to. 

The thing you’re drawn to and the label you claim are stories about who you are, and the story is selling something. Identity has a downside we rarely count.

When choosing between passion and survival; when choosing between love or life, it is the martyr who chooses love. We reward the martyr with fame and acclaim. Pity they cannot spend it.