The Weekend of Foolish Attention

Bits and bytes of the week

I’m a list maker. Contrary to the ‘live and let live’ appearance I may present, I’m an anal retentive organizer of my every day. In the shower every morning, I catalogue the events of that day several times. I also use a list program on my iPhone and iPad. A typical Sunday looks a bit like this:

See? I’m just as abrasive to myself as I am the rest of the world…

The Pandemic is no longer a credible excuse. The Great Reset is over. Your life is exactly what it is so move on, please.

I recall a sense of suspended animation at the final week of February 2020. Things in Vegas hadn’t yet shut down as that historic closure was a few weeks away. The rumors were rampant and the idea that something big was coming, something dire, was everywhere. My wife was secretly embarking on a whole new occupation and her mood was slightly frantic.

Her take was typically anarchist. She was thrilled that the world might shut down. Later she was elated that people would get money for staying home. “The world needs a reboot and this is exactly what will do it.” It wasn’t so much that her living existence would change—she was the ultimate freelancer, taking modeling gigs and standardized patient work when she felt like it—but she felt it could upend the capitalist regime she so resented.

Soon a lot of people felt similarly. Those with plenty (or at least enough) focused on the virus, the responsibilities for social distancing, masks, and vaccines. Those with little found opportunities to cease coming to work or look for work when laid off, effectively taking an extended sick day. Employers took the moment to fire those employees making more money than they wanted to pay and half of the country looking to grind out as much Unemployment cash as possible.

Digital media exploded. With movie theaters closed, streaming services doubled down. Social media became the only way for many to communicate with friends which they could no longer go to a bowling alley, coffee shop, or bar. Horny, bored twenty-something’s found any reason at all to riot in the streets, loot high-end stores, and attack ‘the system.’

Inside the low-grade anxiety of a hidden disease floating around was, for those like my ex-wife, an opportunity to upend things. To make sweeping changes in a strange, often unjust, system. Revolution. COVID did expose what we already knew about society and ourselves, you gotta give it that.

So what actually changed? Did capitalism fall? Did justice prevail? Did the protests and protests-turned-to-riots and riots foment some substantive and meaningful shifts?

That's hard to say, isn't it? Maybe folks fifty years from now will be able to see how things have changed. One thing I'm certain those future people will see was how long we held onto COVID as the excuse for businesses folding or bilking customers, cries of self-diagnosed trauma, and clawing grabs for power.

This is why we can’t claim the moral high ground. It’s easy to claim moral superiority to Donald Trump. I mean, talk about low hanging fruit. In his wake came a slew of organizations built from the ground up to defeat the forces that put him in office despite obvious errors in judgment that opened the presidential field for exactly the sort of crooked asshat that guy is and was. Except:

The New Georgia Project, which helped turn Georgia into a swing state, confronts allegations of mismanagement, undocumented spending.

“I went there all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but I'm disillusioned now,” recalled a former C-suite employee. “I got the assumption that it was driven by ego after the 2020 elections. That there was this: 'We can do anything we want, look at how much money we got.' … I think these things combined with no checks and balances, not having an operations department in place that is allowed to put in policies, procedures and safeguards — which is what I thought I was hired to do — and the rapid growth has just facilitated this.”

“That there is a sort of bridge generation between the civil rights organizers of the ’60s and the people who are organizing now who have a very transactional and corporate approach to Black politics,” Ufot said. “What I built at the New Georgia Project is decidedly different than that, and it invites the comparison.”

Fincher just does it for me, man. His latest, The Killer, on Netflix is sublime. Like John Wick without the superhero element. Simple, dark, philosophical. I consider both his Fight Club and. The Social Network to be nearly perfect films. The Killer is damn close.

Websites need facelifts, too. My personal website doesn’t get a lot of traffic but I like having it nonetheless. For a while, I used it almost exclusively to get work like a LinkedIn profile. I took a look at it the other day and decided it needed some love and attention. So an updated design and focus.

Anything to avoid the gym. I’m not a luddite but it seems like we’re slowly gaining traction on the dystopia of Huxley with our reliance on drugs to make us happy.

“The results of a highly anticipated study published on Saturday indicate that Wegovy can have profound effects on heart health, which potentially opens up the drug to even more patients. A few days earlier, the FDA approved Zepbound, an obesity drug that is a bit cheaper and appears more potent than Wegovy. If there was any doubt before, now it is undeniable: Obesity drugs “are here to stay,” Kyla Lara-Breitinger, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic, told me. “There’s only going to be more and more of them.” They are now poised to become deeply entrenched in American health care, perhaps eventually even joining the ranks of commonly used drugs such as statins and metformin.”

SOURCE

Thinner is definitely better but skinny and weak? Nah. Take a walk, eat a salad, lift something moderately heavy.

The Expectation Trap. I wrote this for Literate Ape but liked it so much, I’ll include it here as well.

Word has it that the key to serenity and avoidance of misery is to have few, if any, genuine expectations from people. Expect nothing and eliminate disappointment. Lower expectations equals a lower threshold for the unexpected.

This happens a lot with job interviews. Managing your expectation prepares you for the possible rejection and feels like it softens the blow. It does not. Lowering expectations is simply another way to accept defeat. “I’m probably not going to get the job anyway because I’m [fill in the blank with reasons someone won’t see your value as an employee] so I just won’t get my hopes up.”

Yes, the odds in favor of success in this world are almost always astronomically against you. Acceptance of that reality is the road to settling for less than you desire and a lifetime of resentment and self loathing that can (and often will) culminate into a seething rage, a sense of personal injustice, and a powder keg in your gut just waiting for a match.

He who prepares for death is already dead.

A recent friend tells me one night how much he hates his boss, feels defeated every single day in his job, and bemoans that he doesn’t know if he can do it anymore. The gut tells us that he has gone down this road for a decade or so and has accepted slight upon slight, each miserable day justifying the next, that the chances he’s going to jump ship and find something better grows less likely with each passing hour. The calcified bones of compliance and embrace of suffering cage him like the single chain on the captive elephant’s leg.

If you expect to fail, you will.

The story that stuck following college courses in education was that of a substitute teacher coming into a class of sophomores mid-year. He is handed a class roster and next to each student’s name is a number. The teacher assumes these are IQ scores. He teaches these students for nine weeks with these numbers in the back of his mind. At the end of the term, sure enough, the kids with higher numbers nailed it and those with lower scores blew it.

He then figures out the numbers were for their lockers.

This is where the fallacy of lowering expectations invites worse outcomes. “Don’t get your hopes up,” says the false wisdom of those who have grown comfortable failing.

Get your hopes up. Every time. Prepare for a home run every single swing of the bat. It hurts more when you lose but you will lose less often and you will absolutely continue to try.