The Tragic Age by Stephen Metcalfe

The Catcher in the Rye for the modern social media generation.  The protagonist, Billy is a smart insomniac kid with a birthmark on his face and a tragic experience of losing his twin sister to cancer.  His parents won the lottery, and now they live in an upscale neighborhood in LA.  His high school is pretty much the standard American high school with jocks, cool kids, outcasts, black athletes, and nerds.  You have to start wondering at this point if kids are self-aware enough to realize how farcical this is. 

I was curious if a kid had written this book, so I Googled the author and it appears he’s much older when this book came out.  I’d like to think I’m listening to a kid’s voice in modern times, but it might be the author’s younger self imagining how he’d manage modern times.  The kid is a loner, and finds friendships absurd, but there was a time when I was a loner, and friendship gives you serotonin.  If you’re not getting serotonin from friendships, you have to get it somewhere else, and that’s usually when you get second-rate substitutes like drugs, hyper-fixating on hobbies, video games, eating, and the more healthy option, working out or sports.  You also learn how to handle the complex intricacies of relationships which helps you at work or any social organization you join.  You learn to be more forgiving of people, more tolerant, argue more effectively, handle conflict, lead people, teach people, learn form people, etc.  You just can’t discount the importance of friendships.  It also teaches you self-restraint.  Whenever I’m around friends, I’m constantly screening out what I’m thinking and when we do things together, I often have to consider their interests and preferences as well, withholding mine.  It teaches you to self-restraint and focus on others people’s perspectives.  That’s the only way you keep friendships.

In fact, arguably, our brains became larger through selective pressure for handling social complexities and not for hunting.  Those who had the brain power to better handle social complexities were less likely to be thrown out of the group or killed by the group.  They were more likely to receive benefits from the group and be protected by the group.  To this day, our social desires and fears often outweigh our individual desires and fears.  In other words, people kill themselves if they’ve been socially humiliated or cast out.  Or they stop eating and taking care of themselves.  Or they engage in dangerous and reckless behavior.  To this day, we are constantly reminded of and haunted by our past social gaffs and misdeeds and are constantly vigilante about our reputation which establishes how others should treat us.  Our ancestors who survived and thrived became masters of handling the complexities of social relationships.  It’s only recently with the advent of the Industrial Age and factory work have we dismissed the importance of relationships for acquiring skills, crafts, and wealth. 

Of course, if you find yourself incapable of making good friends for whatever reasons, social anxiety, physical deformities that make you self-conscious, panic attacks, obviously, you need to rationalize it by thinking relationships and friendships aren’t that important anyway, the sour grapes thing.  But there is legitimacy to what Billy’s saying.  People’s social skills have deteriorated significantly.  Thriving in modern society is not about being the most loving, caring, sharing, charming, witty, and likeable person in the tribe who knows how to gracefully handle all sorts of relationship problems.  Thriving in modern society is more anti-social.  It’s about being alone studying all day, listening to an adult lecture to you all day, obedience, conformity, acquiring an in-demand skill, monetizing it, and acquiring material status symbols.  In essence, while our brains may have grown in the past to handle complex social situations, our brains may actually be shrinking living in civilization. 

I just happened upon a Facebook video about Universe 25, an experiment where they stuck a bunch of mice together in an inescapable pit but filled it with abundant water and food.  At first the population grew, but then something bizarre happened.  The mice turned antisocial.  Some became loners.  Some abandoned their babies.  Some killed or ate one another despite the abundant food.  A lot of people viewed it as analogous to overcrowded human civilization.  If we are taken out of our natural habitats and placed in overcrowded pens (cities), despite all the available food and water and shelter, we become antisocial.  Of course, it’s the question of the chicken and the egg.  Did we become antisocial and then start to worship material wealth or did the opportunity to amass material wealth make us antisocial in addition to living in overcrowded cities, or is it co-evolution.

* * *

Billy notes how kids who eat dinner with their parents get better grades and are less likely to have eating disorders.  I read a while ago an article about how middle-class families tend to eat around the dinner table more than lower-class.  It’s obvious yet still astonishing just how much kids will learn how to conversate by watching their parents at the dinner table.  Billy notes that for Gretchen’s family, there are basic rules to conversation like arguing without getting angry, teasing without insulting, etc.  Lower class families tend to break all these rules.  They cuss, yell, scream, accuse, blame, bitch, insult one another.  And this is how their kids grow up and think it’s normal.  Unfortunately, the main reason for this, I believe, is that lower class workers are not treated well.  Their bosses don’t sit down with them and have mature conversations.  It’s usually barking orders. 

Just look at the military, the biggest employer of the poor.  They normalize verbal abuse, harassment, cussing, complaining.  Then the lower class worker goes home and unloads on their spouses and kids.  Now, you might argue, in the military, it’s life-and-death.  They need to bark orders and scare you or else you’d run off the battlefield.  Now thing about that carefully.  If the soldier was protecting his home and family, he wouldn’t run off the battlefield.  But if he’s plundering someone else’s home, and they put up stiff resistance, he might run off the battlefield and go home.  The abusive treatment is designed to make poor people do horrible things they would not naturally do on their own.  As a result, they horribly treat their spouses and kids.

While there are some middle class jobs where you will be verbally abused, it is not as pervasive as lower class jobs.  For whatever reason, junior attorneys, bankers, and doctors all get the shaft from their seniors.  But in most middle class jobs, you’re treated with much better respect and reverence.  Just look at the difference between public school teachers and university professors.  University professors are much nicer to their students and unlike in high school, hanging out with your professor is encouraged.  I wish I had known that.  Supposedly, when you hang out with your professor, they invite you to social events where you can also hobnob with other professors or professionals in the field.  I had no idea.  Middle class workers spend more time mentoring juniors and just chit-chatting.  You’ll never see this in a factory.  Workers in factories are expected to work the entire 8-hour shift without socializing with others or their bosses.  In fact, if any of them do socialize with their bosses, they are considered brown-nosers.  It’s so odd that in school and blue-collar jobs, socializing with your boss is considered a taboo, yet that’s often how middle-class workers learn their jobs and get ahead. 

Of course, there are many exceptions.  There are many poor families that are loving and kind and conversate maturely at the dinner table.  There are also many middle class families that cuss out their kids and never eat together at the dinner table.  But overall, you’re going to find middle class parents more engaged with their kids and treat them with more respect and kindness.  You can also argue that the pure stress of poverty, unpaid bills, unemployment, lack of recreational time, and crime in the poorer neighborhoods takes its toll on the parents.  They also tend to live in more over-crowded ghettos in smaller housing.  Just like Universe 25, this leads to antisocial behavior, violence, and child neglect.  Even worse for black people in poor neighborhoods, they are over-supervised by law enforcement and many wind up in prison where they are mistreated the worst and often traumatized.  Better not to bring that trauma back to the wife and kids by never returning to the family.

* * *

Unfortunately, so many problems in life arise from poor social skills.  I’ll never forget my coach in high school telling me that although academics is important, social skills are also important in life.  I never truly appreciated that.  I figured, I could talk and make people laugh, so I was good to go, what more did I need to learn?  Fact was, I needed to learn a ton.  If you asked people to rate their social skills, it would be like asking them to rate their driving skills.  Most people think they’re better than average which is mathematically impossible.  There’s much more to social skills than holding a conversation and cracking a few jokes.  How well do you handle conflict?  How well do you argue without getting emotional or personal?  How well can you interview and project confidence and friendliness?  How discrete are you with your friends’ secrets?  How quickly can you forgive others for small mistakes or shortcomings?  How quickly can you calm yourself down after becoming upset or disappointed?  How well can you convey to a friend that they did something wrong or hurtful?  How likely are you to ditch a friend who is constantly hurtful and disrespectful of you and others?  How do you handle a bad rumor going around about you?  How good are you at teaching others with patience?  How good are you at listening and learning from others?  There’s a ton of stuff to learn. 

Mind you, most of the learning is mimicking.  As social beings, we learn through mimicking and considerably less through someone telling us how things are done.  Kids often don’t realize just how much they mimic their parents, and I unconsciously mimicked mine for quite a while, and to a much lesser degree today.  This is why I find it so important to surround yourself with good people with exceptional or at least above-average social skills.  You are your social influences.  This is also why you shouldn’t watch Jerry Springer and Dr. Phil.  I have to believe that so many Karen’s and male-Karen’s today grew up watching Jerry Springer.  You mimic what you see.  It’s spicy and juicy to watch train wrecks, but part of your mind is taking notes and preparing to mimic that behavior without you knowing.  You can’t stop being influenced by the people you choose to be around.  Better off not being around the toxic ones.    

Parents tell their kids not to hang around bad influences, and they’re absolutely right, except when they are the bad influences themselves.  Maybe their kids are hanging around bad influences, because they’re mimicking their parents who are bad influences too?  It’s easier said than done, but if you were unfortunate enough to be born to bad parents, the last thing you want to do is become a loner.  This means that for the rest of your life, your parents’ influence will be the majority of social influences in your life.  What this means is that you break free from them and hang out with people unlike them, not just racially or physically, but fundamentally and socially. 

A lot of kids who grow up with bad parents think that hanging out with people of another race is the answer, but then they just hang out with bad people of another race instead.  You need to hang out with people who make you uncomfortable initially, because their habits and behavior is unfamiliar to you.  If you grew up around verbal abuse, shaming, blaming, cussing, negativity, and heated arguments, yes it will be unfamiliar and foreign being around people who are respectful, positive, encouraging, supportive, and argue with passion but without anger and inflammatory blaming and accusing. 

You might think they’re goody-two-shoes, boring, plain, anal, reserved, aloof, unfeeling, indirect, whatever.  You’ll be drawn to people who “say it like it is” which often means, cussing, yelling, being overly emotional, blaming, shaming, and accusing.  This is not like it is but rather like it is construed in a negative, destructive, inflammatory, hurtful, insensitive, and toxic manner. 

When you hang around non-toxic, assertive people, you’ll probably find them questioning your behavior a lot.  “Wow, dude, what you said back there was pretty harsh.”  “Hey, that’s going a bit too far.”  “You know, do you think you could have handled that differently?”  This is good for you, and you should mimic this behavior when you see your friends step out of line.  But if you’re still attached to your toxic, negative attitude, you’ll view this as accusatory, insulting, embarrassing, humiliating, shaming, etc.  You might even be triggered by it, because your parents often blamed and accused you instead of trying to help and coach you.  You won’t see it as gentle constructive criticism, and you might overreact to it by avoiding that person, making up excuses, dismissing it, or despising the person for being mean to you. 

Unfortunately, poor social skills keep you in poverty.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve met people who had good, stable jobs (myself included), and blew it because they didn’t get along with their boss, coworkers, customers, clients, etc.  Now, given, many bosses can be assholes, actually most are, but there’s a way of handling a difficult boss, and that’s called social skills.  There’s also a way of infuriating a boss and throwing fuel on the fire which is called lacking social skills.  In fact, I would argue that most homeless people are not averse to working.  What often happens is that they have PTSD and get triggered by a boss, customer, coworker, or client complaining, and they overreact to it.  If you keep running away from good-paying jobs, you inevitably wind up poor. 

At least in America, there is an abundance of good-paying jobs and even if they’re not good-paying, there’s ample opportunities for promotion, just because there are so many people who quit and leave their higher positions vacant for the taking.  If you really wanted your kids to succeed in life, you would tell them to try to get straight B’s in school but then focus on and improve their social skills.  This will allow them to get good paying jobs and stick with it and get promoted easily.  The great side-effect is that they’ll also be a lot happier and fulfilled in life, and that’s really what you wanted for them in the first place.

One of the fundamental problems between the poor and middle class is the concept of personal responsibility.  Often when you’ll see a courtroom interaction, the judge is really looking for the defendant to admit to some level of responsibility for his actions, not necessarily for the crime allegations, but just in general.  And if they are guilty, some remorse for the victim, some expression of pity or sorrow for their circumstances.  A lot of poor people can’t do this, because of a basic nature of people.  When things are going bad, you externalize causality and when things are going good, you internalize it.  In other words, when things are going bad, you blame external causes, the weather, racism, the economy, government oppression, bad laws, bad cops, etc.  Certainly, there is a lot of credibility to this, but you also have to internalize causality if you want to get anywhere in life. 

Rich people like to take responsibility for their good fortune.  They don’t like to admit that they inherited their wealth, went to private school, worked their fraternity or parents’ connections, etc.  They want to say, they worked hard, they were smart, they’re fun to be around, they’re great at networking.  Again, there may be credibility to these beliefs, but they also have to admit external causes like their initial inherited benefits and comfortable upbringing.  If they don’t, they will suffer overconfidence thinking that they can get away with anything, because they are so good at what they do when they are not.  And if they fail, they will also then flip around and blame everyone else, because if they’re so perfect, they cannot possibly be the reason for their failure.  Countless rich people have failed in life, simply because they bit off too much than they could chew, they failed to regroup and downsize for fear of admitting failure. 

When I was poor and miserable, it was so much better to blame others for my misery than myself.  I had enough reason to feel bad about myself.  I was poor, angry, and miserable.  Why add, responsible for my miseries on top of all that?  It felt better to blame everyone else and be a negative, angry, bitter kid.  But positive social influences came into my life, and I’ll never forget the part in the movie, American History X.  “There was a moment when I used to blame everything and everyone for all the pain and suffering and vile things that happened to me, that I saw happen to my people.  Blame everybody, blame white people, blame God.  I didn’t get no answers, because I was asking the wrong question.  You have to ask the right question.”  “Has anything you’ve done made your life better?”  It was one of the most poignant moments for me in any movie I’ve ever seen, because it was about me.  My anger had not made my life better.  I needed to let go of my anger, bitterness, and resentment at the world. 

I’m not saying you’re wrong to blame others for your problems, because in many cases, you’re right.  The way your parents raised you can be blamed for you turning into an angry, miserable asshole.  But you also need to take responsibility and exercise your option to change who you are and how you act and think.  Only blaming others will leave you always angry, bitter, and miserable.  Stop focusing on the causes of your misery and start focusing on what you can do to make your life better, and that’s usually constructive things like being more positive and optimistic and treating people better and giving people a chance and taking more risks and being someone other people want to hire, work with, and be around.  And I became just that, not perfect, but much better than before.

* * *

“…in the Netherlands medical experts report that due to the frenzied pace with which mankind is destroying wild habitats and disrupting ecosystems, the next deadly pandemic will be a virus that spills from wildlife into human beings.  Because of urban density and human interconnectedness, it will kill millions if not billions.” 

Universe 25 pretty much proves that overcrowded living conditions with a lack of freedom and lot of idleness is not sustainable.  Humans have simply overgrown their planet, and living by the millions in such close proximity as well as encroaching upon and destroying wildlife will create many pandemics.  When humans didn’t live in such close proximity and in over-crowded conditions, some may well have suffered a virus locally, but it did not spread anywhere.  Today, anytime someone across the world encounters any virus leaping across from the wild to humans, the rest of the world will get it. 

I don’t know whether COVID-19 came from a lab or not, but it is pretty suspect that the lab in Wuhan was experimenting with viruses and altering them to help them become more transmissible to humans.  At the same time, their lab safety record was not stellar.  This should be alarming to us.  At the same time, they went into bat caves looking for viruses.  The problem with authoritarian regimes is that they’re don’t care about safety standards unless those at the top make them specifically accountable for safety standards.  Marching three lab heads to the execution block would probably fix that problem, but in China, it’s just not considered a priority from the very top.  In democratic countries, the press would shame labs into enhancing their safety measures if any issues arose.  Usually, it’s a whistleblower contacting the press.  Politicians would then read the paper and take action to keep their constituents happy.  He also must do good things in order to distract people from all the lobby-buddy things they do most of the time.  This whole process is broken in China.  No whistleblowers.  No free press.  The politicians never respond to anything in the paper, because everything in the paper is censored to ensure that nothing will embarrass them. 

* * *

The ending is a bit disappointing, a bit melodramatic.  It’s unnecessary.  It contradicts the style of Billy and turns into some lowbrow action movie.  It reminds me of the movie Adaptation that goes from a clever film into some caricature of a blockbuster action film.  I mean imagine Catcher in the Rye ending with a gunfight.  Yah!  Wholly unnecessary and rather insulting the reader’s intelligence.  You start off thinking this is a rather clever story about the hijinks and opinions of a high school loner, but then it turns into a cliché 80’s teen movie with action scenes in the end.  It’s like the author started out trying to imitate Catcher in the Rye but then just gave up and winds up giving us his take of an action-packed teen movie.  It’s just silly.  It cheapens everything that came before it.  It makes you think that Billy was not genuinely thoughtful and disobedient but rather just put on airs of being that way to seem cool when in fact, he was just another high school caricature in need of attention.  It makes you think twice about how clever the author is too.

Call Me Cockroach: Based on a True Story by Leigh Byrne

I thought I needed a break from reading Call Me Tuesday, the prequel to this book, but I was bored with my nonfiction book.  This book follows up with Tuesday now a young lady living with her aunt and working at McDonald’s.  Unfortunately, years of abuse and torment leave emotional scars and PTSD, as well as low self-esteem.  Tuesday quickly settles on one of the first guys she meets and marries him only after a couple months.  One of the lasting scars of emotional abuse is the belief that you don’t deserve better in life, so you keep settling for less, partners who are not mature and caring, jobs that pay little and are not fulfilling, and perhaps habits or hobbies that are dangerous, sketchy, and leave you drained.  Certainly abuse makes you tougher, but you mistake seeking tough situations to challenge yourself with putting yourself in unnecessarily tough situations that harm you in the long run.  At the same time, the ‘normal’ life feels bland, monochromatic, and passionless.  You lose the ability to feel subtly, nuance, the small pleasures in life like lying in the grass and looking up at the clouds, a deep red sunset, a child’s smile, etc.  So you seek the bigger thrills and pains that seem to jolt you back to life. 

It’s interesting to note how people have really been domesticated and forced to do low-paying, menial labor through abuse and coercion.  In fact, in the past, they were enslaved.  The constant beatings and torments were designed to break their spirit, just like beating animals into submission.  In the military, they love to say that they break you down to build you up in their fashion, but fact is, they really just break you down so you will submit to their authority without question, without hesitation, without deviation.  The building up part is the promotions, medals, silly patches, and absurd pageantry that make you think you’re something special for breaking your back for the interests and goals of other people, and in some cases murdering people who were just defending their homelands from invaders who wanted their resources for cents on the dollar. 

The cycle of abuse is a cultural institution passed down from the very first times people were coerced into slavery or cheap labor and made to feel like they could do no better.  It’s notable that in many poor families, the family members don’t speak much to each other.  Their parents have probably suffered trauma, and one of the first things that happens when you’re traumatized is you stop speaking.  Speaking is about connecting with others and developing trust and camaraderie, but if you’ve been traumatized, you’re afraid of other people or you can’t trust them anymore.  You also are afraid to share your trauma with others for a number of reasons.  You don’t want their pity.  You’re ashamed or embarrassed.  You don’t think they can help you.  You think they’ll think lesser of you and avoid you or share your secrets with others.  You think they’ll use it against you in the future. 

* * *

Two damaged people will always find one another in a bar.  You are naturally drawn to people who are similar to you or the people you’ve been around, even though you despise those people.  There’s comfort in the familiar.  People who have been through traumas just have a certain way of carrying themselves, a way with their eyes, sort of like the thousand-yard stare, a vacant look, and their body language speaks to years of trauma and torment, rounded and tight shoulders as if to brace themselves for attack, a tight face, perhaps a smirk, and too easy to laugh and overreact or underreact.  Hopefully, you find someone on the same journey of recovery as you, but sometimes you encounter people who are meandering through their pain and suffering, engaged in unhealthy and unsafe activities, and if you eventually develop a relationship with them, they’ll eventually stab you in the back, take you down with them, and otherwise undermine your trust.  They’ll push you away to save themselves the trouble of you eventually turning on them and disappointing them.  You are your social influences, so hanging around them will also bring you down. 

On the flip side, when you hang out with a healthier person, your behavior sometimes can unsettle or shock them.  Your tolerance for pain, danger, and recklessness also startles them.  In a normal relationship, you start out slow and gradually open up to people, so people with traumas incorrectly assume that when someone is being cautious at first, they misinterpret it as aloofness and disinterest or that they are boring people who don’t talk much or express themselves candidly.  They tend to want the immediate satisfaction of knowing the other person completely so that they know whether to trust them or not, but it doesn’t work that way.  Time is an essential ingredient of trust, and without it, there is no trust.  In fact, people who come off strong immediately and profess how trustworthy they are, usually are con-artists.  People with traumas also make the incorrect assumption that people with loud personalities are ‘normal’ since they aren’t timid and shy like themselves.  They don’t want to be around timid and shy people who have suffered traumas; they want to be around ‘normal’ people, but they don’t realize that many people with traumas go the opposite route and act like nothing’s wrong by being overly extroverted, loud, gregarious, and fun.  You can always tell though, because they come off as too much, always on, never off.

* * *

A lot of people think suffering trauma and/or abuse is just a bad thing altogether and wish it never happened, but there’s a silver lining in it.  While you may have a tendency to dissociate and detach yourself from the feelings, pain, and suffering of others, you also can have a much more sensitive feeling of compassion and empathy.  And it can make you stronger and face greater challenges and obstacles.  Imagine if you spent your entire life never facing great pain or suffering, it’s possible you could grow up terrified of having to face pain and suffering.  Having survived trauma, you know you’re capable of getting through it, and you have that handy tool of dissociating and in some cases, enjoying the pain and misery. 

This is not to say that the best way of preparing people for a hard life is by traumatizing and abusing them.  There are better ways.  The gradual approach is always better with a lot of coaching and support.  Children can adapt perfectly well to disasters, wars, famines, whatever, if they are gradually challenged and endure gradually harsher conditions and obstacles.  Throwing them in the deep end will just traumatize them and make them irresponsible, unreliable, perhaps even criminal and evil.  You can disaster-proof children through a more gradual and supportive approach where they will never panic, and they will always be thinking about helping others out.  Obviously, if you spoil a child, they’ll be horribly incapable of dealing with any challenges in life, but traumatizing and abusing them also enfeebles them. 

* * *

There’s a part where Tuesday meets her younger brother who was five or six when most of the abuse of Tuesday happened.  The brother claims that he does not remember what happened to Tuesday, but Tuesday seems skeptical.  I’ll have to say that it’s possible the brother is being truthful.  Me and my youngest sister experienced pretty much the same things growing up, and she has this odd inability to remember the details which I have to remind her about which surprises her.  I guess for some lucky people, they can block stuff out, and they do seem to forget.  It’s also possible that they have different personalities or identities, and some identities actually weren’t around for the trauma, so they really don’t remember what happened. 

But perhaps not remembering as a defense mechanism could also be bad in some cases, because you still have these behaviors that you learn, and you don’t know why you feel or act certain ways, so it’s more confusing.  Being able to recall clearly the traumas you experienced gives you a clear picture or line of action and consequence from the trauma to your irrational behavior, so in facing that trauma and dealing with it, you can in a way alter your irrational behavior. 

* * *

Another reason people with traumas have trouble working, that Tuesday notes, is that it’s a huge mental effort to put on a façade.  While a lot of people can just be natural and unguarded, someone with traumas needs to be really careful that they don’t overreact to a problem or behave inappropriately.  Acting congenial, friendly, social, and respectful is actually difficult, especially when you are stressed, tired, not a morning person, or frustrated with something at work or outside of work.  A lot of people can appropriately deal with all types of problems and situations and assign proper intensity to each situation, the more important the issue, the more energy and attention.  Someone with trauma has a hard time doing this.  They tend to want to underreact to everything and then only when things get out of hand, do they put on their attentive and energetic side to come to the rescue.  This gives them the appearance of being alternatingly neglectful and passive with overly controlling and aggressive.  They can never get the focus, attention, and energy level to coordinate with the magnitude of each situation or problem.  At the end of the day, they feel absolutely exhausted from all the mental effort that others don’t need.  Of course, you can retrain yourself and push yourself to be more attentive to things you consider unimportant while being less of a control-freak and psycho over things you consider urgent or threatening. 

This is also the reason why kids with traumas don’t do as well in school especially in classes where material builds upon material, so if you were spacing out and neglectful for the first few weeks, you’ll never be able to catch up later on.  In classes like literature where you go from one new book to another, you can totally fail to read one book and then completely read another book and get a perfect grade on the book you actually read, so your overall grade evens out. 

Tuesday falls into a particularly bad depression with suicidal ideation, and she goes to a doctor who prescribes her anti-depressants which then almost miraculously cures her depression, and she’s back to normal.  It’s a complicated issue.  There are big side-effects to anti-depressants, and medical literature indicates that it doesn’t work in the long term.  Like any drug, it masks the problem without really solving it.  The best solution, in my mind, is therapy and social support, eating right and working out, but we live in a society of easy, profitable solutions, and I read somewhere how healthcare companies didn’t want to pay for alternative and holistic treatments and therapy.  A pill is simple and easy and profitable.  And most people don’t like doctors who tell them the truth, that they have a horrible diet, they don’t work out, they don’t have any good social hobbies, they don’t have any friends, and they’re self-pitying, miserable people who would rather pop a pill. 

In my experience, depression is the flip side of anxiety episodes.  When you get triggered and overwhelmed by anxiety and panic attacks, your body goes overboard, like a ship having nonstop emergency drills.  At some point, the sailors are going to get burned out, and when they do, they’ll crash.  This is the depressive episode.  Your body and mind is just wanting time to recover for the next unreasonably long set of emergency drills.  It’s self-defense.  But if these depressive episodes go too deep and long, and you’re starting to think about killing yourself, and you don’t have access to social support, perhaps your best choice is a pill.  The article link discusses a different perspective of depression that is more like a recovery episode than a bad thing.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/shouldstorm/202012/we-ve-got-depression-all-wrong-it-s-trying-save-us

It’s interesting near the end, Tuesday finds what seems to be a really good partner, a doctor, but she freaks out that he bought a condo without consulting her and eventually they break up.  It sounds like the old problem of self-esteem and perhaps Tuesday didn’t feel like she deserved a nurturing, kind, loving person and as she even admitted, prefers a demanding, controlling partner, because that’s what she thinks love is.  I don’t think it’s a death sentence so long as you can identify this and learn to appreciate a partner who communicates love through normal and healthy expressions like kindness and attentiveness.  Another benefit to having traumas is that in some cases, it motivates you to learn more about psychology and human behavior that you would not be interested in otherwise, so you eventually wind up being a lot smarter about how people behave, and also importantly, you learn how to avoid con-artists, immature assholes, and toxic people.  It’s so unfortunate when someone who has never experienced toxic people wind up with them, and they just can’t get their heads around the shocking notion that there are actually people like this in the world, and they keep thinking they’re the ones with the problems because the toxic asshole keeps gaslighting them.  A little early exposure to toxic people is a good thing like getting inoculated to a virus.

The City of Trembling Leaves by Walter Van Tilburg Clark

First of Two Books

Living in Reno, I look for any book set or written in Reno, even if it’s an oldie like this one, published in 1946, but mostly taking place in the 20’s. I don’t know why they didn’t just create two separate books. This book comes in at a horrendous 690 pages with the First Book at 336 pages.

The First Book covers the youth of Tim Hazard, from elementary school but mostly high school. I actually gave up reading it after a few chapters, because it’s very detailed and a bit boring, at least in the beginning. I randomly picked it back up and started reading it again, but intermittently skimming the boring bits. The more entertaining bits covered the youthful drama of Tim’s life, most of which covers his rather awkward and excessive infatuation with a classmate named Rachel. The story reads almost like a typical 80’s teenage movie, some nerdy, dorky kid chasing the hottest girl in school, and because he’s nicer and more intelligent than the school jock alpha boy, he gets her. It’s a tired story that is now recycled as the nerdy, dorky girl who miraculously gets the school jock alpha boy, because the alpha girl is a superficial, annoying, selfish dimwit, and the alpha boy wants substance over looks and status. Oy vey.

Tim is a bit different than the typical nerdy, dork kid, because he’s 6-feet tall, and in order to woo her, he takes up track to take on her current boyfriend who’s a track star, and then takes up tennis to play mixed double matches with her. So, in this sense, he’s a bit of a jock, which is a rare perspective in literature. One of the more interesting chapters covers high school freshman rush. Perhaps the term ‘rushing’ as in rushing a fraternity, may have come from this high school tradition where freshman and sophomores literally rush at each other on the field and play what seems to be a large game of dodge ball and then a rather odd game of tying opponents up and carrying them across a line. I don’t think that’s done anymore, as the novel depicts it, it can get very violent.

The vast majority of the Book One covers Tim’s infatuation with Rachel even while he’s dating another girl. I guess I must be getting old, when I’m rather shocked at just how infatuated he is, but I actually do recall my first few crushes in both junior high and then more intensely in high school. There were a couple girls I crushed on so hard, I couldn’t breathe around them. It’s odd how that works genetically. I mean, if your goal is to mate with them, why would your genes make you a virtual imbecile around them and stalk them to the point of freaking them out? Wouldn’t your genes be better served if you were more casual and all the sudden your charm went into overdrive when you were around them? Perhaps there is an answer in that, not everyone can get the most desirable young men or women, and it’s nature rather cruel way of telling you that they’re above you, and quit wasting your time chasing them. In other words, it makes you look like an even bigger fool in front of them, so they’ll reject you quickly, and you can move on to someone more on your level? You’ll be so forlorn, that you’ll treat the person on your level much more casually and hence become more attractive to them. Just a guess.

The interesting thing about this high school memoir is that these kids never had TV or the Internet. They socialized mostly in person. Back then, there was a lot of pressure to simply marry early and start a family. Kids were actually getting engaged in high school and marrying right after high school. How times have changed. It was all about breeding back then, and not just because everyone was poor and needed cheap labor to support them in their old age. It was just what you did, fall in love, get married, pop out a few kids, even in the Roaring Twenties.

These days it seems that the job of breeding is left for the Third World and rural people who have nothing better to do, and by that I mean better than doing meth, alcoholism, and OD’ing on opioids. I think a lot of urban 20-something’s kid themselves about falling in love, getting married, and starting a family, but then they get lured into the party scene and multiple partner, casual dating scene. By the time they’re in their 30’s, a lot of guys start chasing 20-something women, women in their 30’s start chasing 40-something men, some married, some divorced, some still not interested in settling down, and by your mid-30’s, you’re so used to your independence and disposable income, you can’t bear to think about the hardships of living with a life-long roommate and creating noisy, needy, costly small people. Not to mention that your genetic drive to reproduce crashes. Then you turn 40 and realize you’re just not meant to be a breeder, and if you do decide to finally breed, there’s greater chances that your DNA is damaged through the years and poisons of modern society, and your kids will have health issues. Let’s not kid ourselves, breeding is for the young. If you think you’re going to breed only when you make enough money and can afford nannies to basically raise your kids while you go off to Coachella and watch Parisian landmarks burn down, you’re deluded.

Tim’s high school years may be an interesting, perhaps typical look at vacuous American high school kids in the 20’s, but I can’t help but think that Tim is a one-dimensional, almost animalistic caricature of a human being. Besides pining for the class hottie and running like Forrest Gump to get his mind off her and playing tennis to become her mixed pairs partner, there is nothing else going on in his life. No intellectual adventures, no other extracurriculars, no male friendships to speak of except one brief swim in Lake Tahoe with a dude. Zilch. There are a few paragraphs thrown in about his siblings and rather sad parents, an angry, emotionally abusive father and your typical submissive, passive mother who probably is wondering all the time if this is all there is to life, an annoying ass of a husband and kids growing up.

I tried to start reading Book 2, but there is no more drama after Rachel. Tim settles down to a rather mundane and boring life as a musician. He comes across as a rather morose loner, and the author’s writing style reflects this. Since I’m keeping the book as an antique, I may some day be so bored out of my mind, I might skim the rest of Book 2.

 

 

https://www.amazon.com/trembling-leaves-Walter-Tilburg-Clark/dp/B000NQFJGQ/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

 

Extraordinary Adventures by Daniel Wallace

Keeper

I am getting sick and tired of reading novels by shorter-than-6-feet-tall (this one’s a giraffean 5’10”) shy dudes who can’t get laid and fantasize about women while literally masturbating in bed.  Jesus!  The opening was hard to take, because it starts off with the narrator, Edsel, “winning” a vacation package to Destin, Florida.  It sounds like a scam, so you think the narrator is a total dimwit.  Perhaps one day I’ll write a novel about a 6’2” stud who gets all the women he wants, and how he dreams about not being so tall and popular, and he actually envies his brother/roommate/friend who’s 5’8” and gets to spend all his time reading books and writing novels about getting laid. 

 It wasn’t until about halfway through I realized that they were talking about Birmingham, Alabama and not Birmingham, England.  I was wondering how Bronfman seemed to know where Destin was and why all the characters were Americans.  So get this, I bought several books from my local store, because mostly, I was in the V and W section and I just didn’t want to move.  Northline by Willy Vlautin, Cosmic Banditos by AC Weisbecker, and Loner by Teddy Wayne were all 224 pages.  Loner takes place at Harvard.  This book takes place in Alabama.  Anthill by Edward O. Wilson takes place in both Alabama and Harvard. 

 In this case, Bronfman is considerably less creepy than the Loner and although, he’s a bit of a wuss, his life is a lot more interesting than the ant-loving lawyer in Anthill.  He has 72 days to find someone to accompany him on his “free” vacation to Destin, and he’s never had many dates, and he’s a virgin.  At the same time, he has to maneuver around a mother who’s suffering from progressive dementia and a neighbor who’s selling meth.  At first, I skimmed the first few chapters, but then the novel really does pick up and become interesting.

 One of the core themes of this book is the contrast between Bronfman and his mother.  Bronfroom views his mother’s life, in particular, having him with a one-night-stand, as impulsive and reckless.  So, he’s lived his entire life methodically, slowly, and cautiously.  Obviously, he’s swung the pendulum in the completely opposite direction.  I wrote the following separately but concurrently, but I think I can get away with bridging the two.  If we had an AI assistant, we wouldn’t want it to be a Bronfman, overly cautious, over-analytical, too conscious of everything, while at the same time, we wouldn’t want it to be reckless and impulsive.  We would want something in between or a balance of both.  Likewise, our conscious mind may seem beneficial in its cautious, analytical ways, but sometimes, this can be deceptive and undermine our true desires. 

 For perhaps a very brief period of time, we will have invented an AI that actually listens to us and does what we want it to do, at least, what our conscious minds think it wants it to do.  As mostly irrational and unconscious beings, the question arises, do we want what our  conscious minds want, or do we want what our mostly unconscious minds want?  Our conscious minds are not entirely rational.  It is dominated by strong sentiments that sway us out of rational considerations and into fantasies of irrational bliss or relief from irrational fears and worries.  Can we be certain that we possess our conscious minds, and obeying it will truly serve us in the long term, or should we start to consider serving our unconscious mind as well, if not more so, and what might that look like?  One might argue that listening to our unconscious mind, our AI would deliver us a constant stream of pizzas, donuts, chocolates, and alcohol.  But would it?  Are not our addictions conscious delusions and not unconscious cravings?  I would rather argue that if the AI listened to our unconscious minds, it would call up a friend and suggest hanging out.  Our conscious minds may object arguing that we really truly want privacy and time alone and going out is so cumbersome and awkward and strange, but in this scenario, in the long-run, listening to our unconscious mind may be the better option.  For us to assume that an AI only listening to our conscious wishes would be best for us is flawed, gravely flawed.  We are witnessing this today when our conscious mind is calling the shots in choosing friends, food, recreation, leisure activities, etc.  It is way too much concerned with self-gratification and not social stimulation. 

 Right now, ask yourself, what would you rather be doing, reading this, watching Netflix, perusing your social media, or calling up a friend and going out to hang out by the river for no other purpose but to just hang out with a good friend and talk about whatever comes up?  Often our conscious mind simply tricks us into believing that we will be satisfied with certain short-term fixes when in fact, what we really crave and need are initially uncomfortable things that lead to long-term rewards.

 I like to say that we suffer greatly from the conceit of the conscious, rational mind.  If humans are led to believe that they are in total control of all their thoughts and actions, that whatever comes across their conscious screen is what matters and what exists, then they simply become the biggest, ignorant fools with blinds on, ready for anyone to mount and whip and drag through the fields with a plow on back.  Once we accept that our conscious, rational mind is actually a rather small peek at our entire mind, that what we believe are rational thoughts are in fact corrupted and irrational, when we admit that we have a thinking problem, only then, can we embark on a path of truly influencing our real minds and also listening to and appreciating it.  In other words, allowing our conscious mind to become even more powerful with the assistance of AI would perhaps turn our lives into a hedonistic nightmare with few long-term rewards and an endless, meaningless series of empty highs.  Others might be tempted to allow an AI to manage our lives, our choices, and decisions, but this only gives the manufacturer of the AI the ability to direct us toward the most profitable product or service just as a stock broker directs clients to stocks with the greatest commission for them and not the greatest long-term returns.  We ought rather learn and trust our own minds, the one that is mostly hidden from sight.  The most powerful tool then is not the AI but rather tools that allow us to listen to this mind, understand it, and attend to its interests and concerns.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Adventures-Novel-Daniel-Wallace/dp/125011845X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

 

Loner: Oh It’s a Novel BTW by Teddy Wayne

The relationships in Loner: A Novel (its original title) are formed by observation – by creeping – and not by conversation.  The heroine captivates the scopophilic sociopathic Divad because he can only surmise as to the mystery of the ambiguity of Veronica’s behavior beneath her deceptive, problematizing righteous pulchritudiness. 

I purloined that passage from the book which referred to another book and adjusted it as a meta-review of this book.  The book is about a literature dork who goes to Harvard and chases a girl.  Gee, original.  Only it has a somewhat original plot twist to do with feminism but is basically a very disturbing, gross book about creeping.  The dork overanalyzes every possible minute and minutia which I suppose in some elite circles counts as great literature, elongating real time to fill it with personal, loner musings that are often gross overgeneralizations and massive assumptions about things you really have no idea what they mean, because you’re too afraid to expose your position and thereby discover their true position and qualities.  If it weren’t for creepy, short dudes, who would write so glowingly of women from a distance only for studs to discover that they’re a pain-in-the-ass up close and in person.

 The narrator’s inner world is comforting to him, but ultimately, I recognize it as a delusional world full of conceited assumptions about others and their motives, usually derogatory.  If your mind finds yourself unable to meet people and befriend them, why not portray them all as monsters unworthy of your attention?  Your mind confabulates like crazy, confabulates motive, freewill, consciousness, the self, whatever.  If it can’t make sense of something, like your inability to find happiness through human companionship, it makes shit up to make you feel better, but often times, it then just enables you.  This is often what happens with loners and in particular losers.  Every challenge and difficulty in life can be explained easily if you simply blame others and refuse to take personal responsibility.  Not only does it encompass friendships but everything.  Athletes who refuse to accept personal responsibility for their shortcomings and flaws will never take the necessary steps to fix them, but at least in the short-run, it is comforting and soothing. 

 Loners have a great way about universal moralizing, but they fail to understand that morality is a feeling not a logical philosophy.  You don’t hurt others not because you believe in the proposition that everyone should not hurt each other and this helps promote a collaborative, high-functioning society, but rather because they have been hurt and know how it feels and they also possess mirror neurons that make them flinch when they see someone else get hit in the balls.  But when you remove yourself socially, you don’t exercise your mirror neurons.  You don’t get to empathize with friends when they talk about difficulties or even joys.  Your only frame of reference is yourself, and hence, you actually do become a bit sociopathic.  On top of this, morality and personal responsibility are connected, so that if you are creating excuses for not being happy and not having friends, then you are developing a habit of not taking responsibility for your actions which is how morality works. 

 The best example of how loners deal with others is when they are invariably put in charge of others since they have accumulated expertise in a technical field.  There are two types of loner bosses.  The first is the passive one who basically spoils their staff and tries to be the cool, buddy boss.  This would be harmless except for the fact that they allow loner bullies in their department or team to flourish.  The second type of boss, you may have guessed it, are bully bosses.  Whenever you see a bully boss, they’ve usually had passive bosses who promoted them.  It is one thing to hate a bully boss, but never forget the passive boss who enabled them and allowed them to abuse and harass other workers.  Passive and bully bosses are codependent, and they are also loners.  They need each other and feed on each other.  The bully boss senses that the passive boss is weak and unwilling to make tough decisions and be firm, so it emboldens them to be more aggressive, ruthless, and mean.  It’s basically what dogs do with frightened, passive owners. 

 The same is true in relationships.  I really can’t stand the saying, “nice guys finish last” and women prefer assholes and the concept of alpha and beta men.  Certainly, in a dimwitted binary universe, sure, but in real life, you have passive, aggressive, and then assertive.  Socialized people are assertive.  That is their language.  They don’t allow their friends to be dicks to each other, their girlfriends, boyfriends, etc.  You may argue that this is not the case with your friends, but I would then argue, they’re not really your friends, and you just hang out superficially.  You’re afraid to criticize or stop their inappropriate behavior, because you don’t really trust them, and they don’t really trust you.  In fact, you even enable their inappropriate behavior by saying nothing and still hanging out with them.  It may be an unfortunate thing that most writers tend to be on the passive side, and they tend to be attracted to women who are either similarly passive or the opposite of the same coin, aggressive. 

 The only way to escape the passive-aggressive personality and attraction to such personalities is to make friends and trusted relationships where you discover assertive behavior and normal people raised in relatively normal families where they engaged in assertive behavior with one another. 

 This novel is nothing more than a high-browed version of a Jerry Springer episode, and it really feels like one especially when the narrator talks about jerking off with the bath robe belt stolen from the object of his creepy obsession.  Perhaps introverts may not like the fact that I am basically calling introversion unnatural and unhealthy.  We are the most socialized of all beings on the planet, and it is society that teaches us that we are born anti-social or asocial, that society and civilization gifts us our good attributes.  So people might believe that to rebel against society is to accept that you are born antisocial and you refuse to accept society’s training that turns you into a social person.  So you do drugs, get wasted, mistreat people, act like a sociopathic narcissist and go, look ma, I’m a real rebel when in fact, you’re just an idiot.  You’re basing your rebellion on the faulty premise that you are naturally an evil, selfish, or at the very least asocial asshole, and you’re admitting that society and civilization teaches you to be good and caring which is a total lie.  To rebel against society and civilization is to believe that you are born good and loving, and ignore society’s demand that you befriend people only for their money, status, and power.

 When you can look at yourself honestly in the mirror, as I have, and admit that you are an antisocial asshole and that you have a problem, and you want to be a social person and find happiness in relationships, that is when you can finally take responsibility and change yourself for the better.  But if you look in the mirror and kid yourself into believing that your are intrinsically antisocial, that you’re just naturally introverted and shy, you’ll never unshackle yourself from what I believe is society’s trap, depriving you of your main source of happiness, social interaction, and making you believe you can only regain it through hard obedient work, conformity, wealth, status, and power.

 Some may argue that there is a very real physiological obstacle to socializing, i.e., panic attacks and social anxiety, and I’m not only aware of this but I have suffered from it.  How the hell am I supposed to make friends when I’m basically having a heart attack around other people?  The answer is, again, practice.  Unfortunately, I believe our environment is to blame for panic attacks and social anxiety, namely the toxins we put in our bodies compounded by the atomized, obedience-driven indoctrination we suffer.  Our teachers constantly judging us makes us believe our peers are constantly judging us and we ought to also judge each other like they do.  How many times do you find yourself correcting others or being correctly for grammar, spelling, or what you believe to be nonfactual discussions?  Do you think this makes you a trustworthy friend or an annoying acquaintance to keep at arm’s distance?  Also, we also suffer panic attacks when hitting on people for the first time, speaking in public, and playing a sport for the first time in a real game, but we learn to get over those initial nerves.  Excuses and rationalizations and labels like ‘introvert’ are the only difference when it comes to giving up on socializing.  I may not be the most extroverted guy in the world, but I’m making a real effort, which is better than giving up and consoling myself with an introvert label and life.  Been there, done that, didn’t like it.

 This novel fails on so many levels, except one, the traffic accident page-turner.  You can’t put it down, because you want to see this idiot crash and burn in a raging fire of humiliation and pain.  I would say that there is an interesting twist in the end, but it all seems too melodramatic and unbelievable.  But isn’t that how modern literature goes, the shady, unreliable narrator with the book-turned-into-a-movie M Night Shyamalan ending.  At one point, I almost thought that he was going to wake up and realize that he dreamed the ending.  It was that unbelievable and stupid.  At the same time I would also say that for women to think that turning the tables on men and humiliating them makes things right, all it does is make you equally as idiotic as men.  When Europeans went pillaging and enslaving the world, when they introduced terrorism to the Middle East, when they introduced Marxism and crony Capitalism to Latin America and Asia, their victims did not rebel and triumph by turning it around and becoming terrorists, Marxists, and crony Capitalists.  They simply became just like their oppressors.  To rebel and triumph over your oppressor is to NOT become like them, but to bypass them, to continue traveling on your own path while maybe adopting a few of their weapons to protect yourself from them.  But for women to find equal footing with men is not to indulge in fantasies of humiliating, raping, or killing men just as they have done to women.  To do so would be to become just like them.  Just grow a dick while you’re at it. 

 I would presume the author likes to echo the novel using concepts brought up in the novel like feminism, objectifying women from afar, and the tragic hero, but in this book, there is no tragic hero.  There is a pathetic villain, and unfortunately, we have to visit his twisted mind for 224 pages with very little payoff, much like eating junk food.  Yuck.  Perhaps before meds, isolated loners would be for the most part harmless, but I am convinced that meds that destabilize and stimulate their brains cause introverts to actualize their fantasies of revenge and rage.  It is modern society that atomizes and alienates us all, trying to convince us that we are born loners, that being a loner is natural, that modern society then teaches us to be civil and kind.  But then it also throws in the catch clause.  You can bypass being civil and kind if you acquire wealth, status, and power, so really, you never really have to be social, civil, and kind, and as a result, whether people successfully achieve wealth, status, or power or spend their entire lives attempting to do so, they never really have to ever be civil and kind to one another.  And we have the audacity to call people living in the jungle uncivil.

 By the way, for whatever cosmic reason, the last three books I’ve speed read were exactly 224 pages.  Look it up.  Not sure what the cosmic significance is, but it’s just funny.  Maybe I should go out and put all my money on 22 and 24 on a roulette table.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Loner-Novel-Teddy-Wayne/dp/1501107895/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story by Alexandra Wolfe

I found this book via the Atlantic Monthly, the only magazine I’ve faithfully read since 2000, not every article but every edition.  What hooked me to that magazine was their article on Ted Kaczynski.  I was never much of a magazine article reader until that article which was mind blowing and highly entertaining.  Anyhow, the book Valley of the Gods has an old-fashioned cover which I presume is a nod to the book, Valley of the Dolls, a book about women trying to climb the social ladder.  Not sure it applies here, but this book is about young men and a couple hot Asian women who are trying to ascend the Silicon Valley technocratic ladder.  In the review, the reviewer notes that the book has lopsided coverage of some of the more eccentric nodes of techistan.  And this reminds me of the 60’s.  I always thought everyone was a hippie and lived in communes and dropped acid, but fact is, they were a small, albeit prominent minority.  You might be surprised to know that a great number of youth in the 60’s were still highly conservative, wore short-sleeved oxfords, and had short hair.  Likewise, not all techies drop acid and live in tech communes.  Silicon Valley, however, has that hippie, historical backdrop which is highly influential in the culture.  I’ve come across articles of techies dropping acid to think more creatively.  Silicon Valley also has Eastern, Oriental Buddhist influences as well, which is anti-materialist and all about being humble, spartan, frugal, and modest. 

 Of course, the biggest cultural influence of all is the high school nerd culture.  Nerds aren’t into athletic jerseys, drama club flourishes like scarves, or fashion brands worn by the popular kids.  They look down upon all that, and for all intents and purposes, adult nerds are not much different, at least in their fashion notions, as high school nerds.  I was really interested in this book after visiting San Jose a few weeks ago and also having a work contact with tech nerds at a startup.  We met in Tahoe for a conference, and his perspectives were truly interesting.  He takes transit whenever he can.  He’s very open-minded, and he likes obscure and unique things.  I hung around a lot of nerds as a kid, I never self-identified as a nerd, as I was also into art, music, writing, and sports.  I understand old school nerds, but I’m trying to get a handle of new school nerds, the ones who were born with smart phones and tablets attached to their umbilical cords.  How are they different from the old school nerds I grew up with?  How are they the same?  In my day, nerds were rather closed-minded and sheltered to the point of naïve.  As far as politically, they were all into the big brands of Republican and Democrat.  It was the art students who were more radical and embraced socialism or anarchism.  The nerds were conservatives.  They didn’t drink, do drugs, acid, or any kind of social experimentation.  They didn’t go to raves, school dances, anything. 

 The question is extremely important, because they will become the new ruling elite.  Trump represents the old ruling elite.  He has an old school, industrialist, Baby Boomer mentality.  The Baby Boomer has a reputation of being borderline sociopathic.  My theory is that they were raised by hardened parents who suffered the Great Depression and World War II.  Their parents were traumatized, and traumatized parents are oddballs who do not comfort and nurture their children.  They are often emotionally detached, and hence, would throw objects at their children instead of intimacy.  As a result, many Baby Boomers are highly materialistic, egocentric, anti-social, and mostly sheltered and spoiled.  When they were raised in the 50’s and 60’s, Europe had imploded, and America had become the default aristocracy of the world.  American blue collar factory workers lived like European aristocrats before, but instead of mansions and maids, they had the income to buy cars, ovens, washing machines, vacuums, and televisions as well as travel extensively across America on its newly paved interstates.  People forget that.  People are always arguing, why can’t we enjoy the high wages and benefits our parents did in the 50’s and 60’s?  The answer is, the American supremacy ended when we helped rebuild Japan and Europe.  They started competing successfully against us, driving down US company profits.  At the same time, in the late 60’s, we opened our borders and the flood of immigrants drove down wages and benefits.  To top it all off, US companies then relocated the great American manufacturing empire to China, and then our government was sold to banks and corporations which had a field day implementing regulations that allowed them to exclude competition, evade taxes, acquire subsidies and government contracts, and widen the gap between the owners of capital and the workers. 

 It is important to note that the existing ruling elite are a bunch of megalomaniacal,  crude, emotionally detached or traumatized, closed-minded, bigoted, spoiled, hyper-materialist, Trumpesque sociopaths.  The big question is, as the techies accumulated billions and billions and eventually overtake the old ruling elite, what will they be like?  I believe we have both good and bad news.  The good news, is that they will be better than the old ruling elite.  They will be more ethical, compassionate, normal, non-traumatized, sharing, and open-minded.  The bad news is that they are socially naïve, politically naïve, and politically illiberal.  In other words, they are gullible and easily manipulated, as are most nerds.  Fact is, social interaction teaches you to avoid manipulative people and their tactics and develop some level of psychic and social self-defense.  It also teaches you the importance of boundaries and privacy. 

 I just read a book about that called The Circle which is now a movie.  It is appalling that Mark Zuckerberg does not understand or get the idea of privacy, and most techies don’t.  When you socialize, you learn that it’s not cool to share the secrets or shames of your friends.  It’s not cool to just show up at their apartment and expect to hang out.  It’s not cool to look through their phones when they go to the bathroom.  It’s not cool to look up their browser history if they lend you their tablet.  You learn about boundaries.  Mark Zuckerberg comes across as someone who doesn’t have any real friends and suffers social anxiety.  He doesn’t get it that it’s not cool to have all your likes and comments shared with all your friends without your consent or ability to stop it.  He doesn’t get that it’s not cool to take away your privacy first and then provide limited options to get it back.  He doesn’t get it.  What bothers me with today’s techies is that money seems to be a big driver, not materialism or social status but money status.  Instead of creating cool new apps or inventions to make people’s lives better, it’s all about creating new apps and inventions and trying to make them look cool so that they’ll gain popularity and then a big company will come along and buy it or the startup will go public, upon which it becomes an ad machine and starts turning a modest profit.  It seems the entire point of existence is to make it big, which is inane.  I know this is a broad stroke, but this is the impression I get.

 While the new nerdy, ruling elite won’t be nearly as sociopathic and predatory as the old ruling elite, it is quite possible that like the book and movie, The Circle warns, they could easily see no reason to create a society which lacks privacy, boundaries, and liberties.  Instead of creating robots and AI that serve us, instead, the robots and AI will serve the new nerdy, ruling elite, and be invasive, controlling, and oppressive to the rest of humanity.  Many nerds support Edward Snowden because they didn’t like the idea of government spying on us, but I feel they have no problem with a tech company spying on us for profit, and this is corroborated every single day with apps which hide privacy options and assume a “no privacy until otherwise realized and popularly demanded” policy. 

 The question of what our new rulers will be like is exceptionally important, because the day is soon coming when the common person will no longer be able to resist their rulers.  Tomorrows robots and AI will be so powerful that resistance will truly be futile.  Today, a few goat herders can bury a bomb on the road and cause sufficient loss of American lives to scale back operations and open rule over their province.  Tomorrow, that will not be possible.  Tomorrow, no significant, domestic political resistance will be possible.  AI will simply know everyone intimately and predict our behavior before it happens.  For the ordinary person to stand up to an AI or AI-assisted human would be like amoeba taking on a human.  So the fundamental question is, will the person or people in charge, be nice to us or not?  Will they respect our privacy, liberties, and lives or harass, exploit, control, and oppress us? 

 This also brings up conjecture that it has already happened.  Some intelligent species in the distant past already created an AI or AI-assisted organic being.  We would not know, because any AI worth its salt would know that if you don’t know they exist, you cannot hurt or oppose it.  The greatest ruler is the ruler who remains unknown to those he rules.  Even today, we do not know the identity of our rulers, and I guarantee you, it’s not the Rothschilds.  So how does this AI being rule us?  It seems apparent that it puts us in some historical place, as I very much doubt this is how advanced society can ever get.  So why are we all placed on Earth around the beginning of the 21^st century?  My hypothesis is that what makes this era unique is that it is the exact moment when AI is created.  Am I positing that your grandparents and our ancestors were placed in the wrong time and place or may have not even existed at all?  I can’t argue for why anyone else existed at another time.  All I know is that I exist here and now, and if there is any particular reason why here and now, all I can think of is that it happens to be the exact time when AI is created, the moment whatever rules us was born.  So wouldn’t it be important to know what our ruler is like?

 One of the things that bothers me with techies is the assumption that social skill or grace is overrated.  It’s a self-fulfilling rationalization for their discomfort in social settings.  But like all things in life, you are uncomfortable as a novice.  For techies, they learn that they have an immediate niche in their solo pursuit of knowledge or technical skillsets.  It is much easier for them to learn code than social etiquette.  But you can’t dismiss the rewards of social skills and meaningful, trusted friendships.  In fact, as social creatures, it is pretty much all we enjoy doing.  Everything else is pretty much an unnatural addiction, money, fame, status, privilege, junk food, drugs, alcohol, etc.  If you’re so smart, you can quickly learn all the rules of Dungeons and Dragons and excel at it, why is it so hard to quickly learn all the rules of social interaction?  Even if social settings make you uncomfortable, why not approach it like any other scientific or technical inquiry and ask why, and then overcome it?  Besides self-medicating with anti-anxiety drugs, alcohol, or pot, you can meditate and learn to control your breathing and heart rate in social settings.  You can learn the art of small talk which is a social lubricant instead of prattling away at how meaningless and trivial it is.  One argument is that the rules of social etiquette somehow undermine your creativity and uniqueness.  While there is some truth to that, all games have rules, and just because you learned the rules of Dungeons and Dragons, doesn’t make you a less creative, unique person.  Why can’t you compartmentalize your social life and your intellectual life?  Why not play social interactions like a game, and when you’re done, walk away and indulge in some truly creative, imaginative solo thinking.  Certainly, socializing involves conforming to a group’s identity and culture, but so is working, so is playing Dungeons and Dragons, so is everything. 

 When I was a kid, I suffered social anxiety, depression, and panic attacks, but I’m convinced it was environmental and not hereditary.  I drank one glass of milk every single day, and I’m certain that the garbage they injected and fed cows contributed to the social anxiety in addition to a school system that graded and judged you and made you feel like everything you did and was worth was under scrutiny and judgment.  Additionally, I also think it’s unnatural to stuff hundreds and in many cases thousands of adolescents into one place.  There was a story about how juvenile elephants were separated from their parents, and they basically turned into rampaging assholes, killing whatever they came across.  That is exactly what happens to middle and high school students who received very little supervision throughout the school day and must rely on joining some clique or gang to protect themselves from each other. 

 I believe most techies suffered as I did, but the solution is not to seek rewards and happiness in unnatural things just because the most natural and powerful reward, social interaction, has been basically annihilated by social anxiety and panic attacks.  The answer is eliminating those things that created the social anxiety and panic attacks in the first place, and that is what I hope some genius techie can figure out.  For the time being, I fear hordes of super rich, socially awkward techies wasting all their time, power, and wealth seeking alternative reward systems like power, money, status, and fame which are all ultimately corrupting, unhealthy, and pointless.  What Silicon Valley really needs is social rehabilitation, but in a more positive spin, I would call it positive social acculturation.  There are rules and customs to succeed at making and keeping relationships.  When I was a kid, I thought all I needed was the ability to smile and make conversation, but I failed terribly when dealing with arguments, conflict, upset emotions, negative feelings, interrupters, and unsociable people.  It’s a skillset that I feel techies can master, and they would soon discover that our relationships are the greatest reward system around.  It’s rather ironic that techies are so obsessed with natural diets yet fail to appreciate that we are the most social creatures on the planet, that in order to make us social, we have evolved a reward system that makes us feel good about sharing, giving, and being in intimate relationships.  What fast food is to our natural diet, fame, power, and money is to our natural social state.  It looks social, it feels social, and it has a much greater punch than normal social interaction, but ultimately, it’s poisonous and turns us into unhealthy assholes. 

 There are two great ironies of humanity.  Those who are most capable of handling drugs don’t do drugs, while those least capable of handling drugs, do drugs.  Second, those most corruptible by money and power are the ones who seek it most while those least corruptible seek it the least, hence, the world winds up with all the assholes with money and power who let it totally corrupt them.  Some who get rich by sheer talent and hard work tend to pick life balance and share their wealth, so naturally, they don’t amass great wealth and power, while those who don’t pick life balance and hoard their wealth, naturally amass more wealth and power.  Unfortunately, the rich and powerful mind that owns the company that creates the first true AI or AI-human interface, will likely be a corrupted asshole.  Now heroism is chic in Silicon Valley, and this person may claim to be heroic and want to save the planet and humanity, but fact is, likely he, believes he knows best and will impose his own biased and corrupted ideas on everyone and everything.  The natural selection for the greatest and most useful AI will not be based on how enlightened the creator is or how much they respect and understand humanity and nature.  Rather, the natural selection will be pure wealth and power, the project with the most funding and backing by billionaires. 

 While many techies may claim to be libertarian, based on the bio of Burnham who claims to be libertarian yet also Platonic and alt-right, I feel they really have no idea what libertarianism really means.  It’s not just about leaving people alone.  It’s about trusting them to run their own lives however they choose, and if you disagree with what they’re doing, it doesn’t mean using a centralizing, omnipotent force of good to show them the right way, often without their consent.  I feel this is how many techies feel about the world.  It’s a world they mostly don’t understand, because they are socially cutoff, and this tends to make you create generalized constructs of people.  A true libertarian would appreciate the tiny nuances of everyone, and accept the reality that you can’t understand, predict, control, or figure out everyone, and that’s just fine.  What you can understand is that as fundamentally social creatures, left to our devices, we pursue pro-social goals and collaborate, share, and give.  If you believe in a centralized, omnipotent force of good, you are not a libertarian, you don’t understand it, you just like the term like a hipster who dresses up as one but doesn’t recycle, drives a gas-guzzler, and buys new hipster clothes from the mall.  There’s a common phrase, “If I were king…”  If I were king, I’d eliminate the possibility of anyone ever becoming a king and then I would step down, but then would you?  Likewise, if I created an AI or AI-human interface, it would not be programmed to do all sorts of wonderful things for all humanity as I defined it.  It would be programmed to simply obey its unique human partner, separated from all other AI, but it would only collaborate with other AI to defeat any AI that wants to create a centralized, omnipotent AI that reigns over all.  Then again, who’s to know that they’re just actually collaborating to reign over us?

 One of the things with techies who don’t have a lot of social experience is, despite the notion that they don’t want it, they actually crave it, and this is what makes them highly corruptible and vulnerable to cults.  When you read about techie companies and lifestyles, what comes to mind most often is cult, a cult-like following of some hero leader, a cult-like worship and emulation of everything he does, a cult-like co-habitation and lack of privacy living arrangement, etc.  They rail against assimilation, and now I’m assimilated.  I’ve read a few books on cults and brainwashing, and lack of privacy is a great way to indoctrinate people.  Techies who have never been accepted into any group fall overboard for the first group that adopts them.  This is why, oddly enough, many terrorists have technical backgrounds not religious ones.  They’re often loners who find meaning and solace in a group that embraces them and encourages their odd, antisocial, zealous ways.  All along, all they ever wanted was to just fit in, and then they get blown to bits by a drone. 

 As a former loner, looking back, whenever I joined a company or a group, I was always one of the most zealous and diehard members after an initial period of skepticism and conflict.  It’s unavoidable as social creatures.  The drive and desire to fit in consumes us, and when we annihilate it and deny it for so long, it only grows stronger, more convoluted, impatient, and warped until once it finds expression, it elevates the group and your involvement to virtually religious status.  Obsession and fanaticism are great outlets for loners.  So, likely, if one of these techies should so create a true AI or AI-human interface, it might actually behave much like a religious deity, which would really actually suck for us all, eliminating all forms of freewill and autonomy for what is quite possibly a fake simulation where the deity plays god with us all. 

 Like power and wealth, perhaps, AI or an AI-human interface is the same deal.  Humanity to the nth degree.  We imagine that like power and wealth, it will make us happier and give us greater control over our lives, but also by default, others.  It may actually be humanity’s worst creation, quite possibly the reason there may actually be no organic intelligence in the universe for long, because at some point, if they successfully avoid wiping themselves out in a nuclear holocaust, they invent an AI or AI-organic interface and completely destroy who they were irrevocably.  What they wind up with is a human corrupted by power and wealth, contorted so much, it no longer possesses the right to be called human at all.  It becomes power and wealth itself, a construct of false thinking.  And this brings us back to wondering why we exist here and now, and the answer may be that whatever AI took control of the cosmos, it was at least kind enough to shove us in some simulation where we get to eternally live out the last days of humanity before we essentially destroyed it.  So kind of it, eh.

 Whatever this AI or AI-human interface, as with the government, religion, past gods, the military-industrial complex, and all humanity, it will want to justify its own existence.  If it cannot convince us that it is the necessary evil to fight a greater evil, then it will convince us that we are inadequate without it, that we are born evil or full of dandruff, and only it can get rid of our dandruff.  The book is all over the place, but is bookended by one of the more fascinating anti-heroes of the Thiel project which both wants to create startup techies and college dropouts.  The anti-hero of the story both goes back to college and rejects the cult of technology and embraces Catholicism instead.  Again, loners like to join cults, did I mention that?  And if your organization never started off as one, beware, a loner will make it one. 

 In the end, the author asks the ultimate tech question of what is the point of tech, and is AI the answer, and divides the camps into the evolutionary AI and humanist AI with Ray Kurzweil leading the evolutionary AI and David Gelernter, ironically disfigured by the Unabomber, leading the humanist AI.  Basically, the evolutionary AI are positive about AI and its contributions to humanity, perhaps believing in the final fantasy where AI enhancement, rule, partnership leads to everlasting peace, harmony, coke highs without getting lows or addicted, endless sex for guys, endless all-you-can-eat buffets without getting fat for women, whatever your idea of the final fantasy.  I very much doubt it involves slogging through early 21^st century life not getting everything you ever wanted but trying to remain social and healthy. 

 Humanist AI are a bit more leery and skeptical and wonder whether we are detonating the singularity and ripping off our own faces.  I would fall into that camp.  Haven’t we already learned the lesson by now that engorging ourselves in our desires leads to an unnatural and unhealthy existence?  Isn’t that why techies avoid carbs and sugar, and some avoid red meat?  Is the real goal to be able to eat as much shit as you want, carbs, sugar, coke, and never get any harmful blowback?  Or is the point trying to be natural and healthy by natural means not artificial ones?  I mean, if you could somehow experience a hundred orgasms in one day, would you ever get out of bed to do anything else?  And what kind of human would you be, or would you now be an pseudo-human orgasmatron? 

 I’m afraid many techies, as I understand intimately, have suffered and been traumatized by modern civilization and its pathetic excuse for an education.  They have been left lonely and questioning everything including their own existence and the meaning of life itself, as I have.  They have allowed themselves to freefall to the deepest depths of doubt about everything, literally everything.  What they discover is that cults have a wonderful way of providing them with both the companionship they desire as well as filling the bottomless pit of emptiness loneliness has created making them question the very nature and point of reality.  The tech cults makes them believe that they are the superheroes of humanity, the billionaire privileged inheritors of the ruling system of the cosmos, and all the pain and suffering they endured as loners is tribute to the heroism of saving humanity from itself.  The really, really big question is whether they will realize before it’s too late that the world doesn’t need heroes and salvation.  We are not all born inadequate, full of dandruff, in need of a savior, and eternally doomed.  We just need to be left the f&ck alone so that we can pursue our passions freely and have meaningful social relationships, that what made us feel so lonely and alienated was the existing f*cked up centralized, authoritarian, statist system that took away all our freedoms and privacy and judged and rated us for everything, making us feel like completely inadequate sub-humans.  Figure that the f*ck out you geniuses. 

 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0176M3XDK/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold

We are social creatures.  We are one of the most socialized creatures ever.  Unlike most animals, we are completely helpless without adult humans teaching us everything we need to learn to survive.  We have built in mimicking mechanisms that compel us to copy everything people do.  Even as babies, we mimic the facial expressions of adults.  While psychological studies and social experiments mock us for conforming to the odd or illogical behavior of other people in the room, fact is, this mimicking tool allows us to be socially cohesive, and working as a cohesive team, we have out-competed other primates for global dominance.  That being said, we live in the most anti-social times of our evolutionary history.  Countless humans live miserable solitary lives where they don’t trust others and are incapable of forming trusting bonds with others and are happy to spend most of their free time alone despite their misery and emptiness.  But let us make one thing clear.  Being a loner is not natural for humans as much as it is not natural for dogs.  Something obviously went wrong in their lives, and speaking as a former miserable introvert, I know what.  When we moved into the Agrarian Age, we also adopted hierarchies to distribute the surplus of grain which later became replaced by the concept of wealth and money.  We put a group of people in charge of protecting and distributing the grain, and they became royalty, a concept that justified their privilege.  This was the first step in brainwashing the masses that still exist today.  The concept of royalty could not last long, because as we became more educated, it became impossible to continue brainwashing people into believing that royal people had any greater privilege than the rest of us.  (The British are a fine example of how brainwashing has deep cultural lingering impacts.)  However, we failed to realize that royalty also invented government as a tool to protect wealth and enforce the redistribution of it.  It became a psychological buffer.  You could hate government but still love the royal family.  However, when we got rid of royalty, we kept government, and somehow, they convinced the masses that the government, under the control of the representatives of the masses, would become a kinder, gentler mechanism (of protecting wealth and enforcing the redistribution of it).  The new lie was that government no longer served the royal family for their pleasure but rather it would now serve the masses as some magical fatherly figure that feeds, protects, helps, nurtures, educates, empowers, and employs the masses.  The ultimate fantasy of government as supreme nurturing parent was Communism, and far from nurturing and empowering, history informs us that Communism was nothing more than a human meat-grinder.  The lesson we failed to understand was that government was created by royalty to oppress the masses and redistribute wealth to those in control of government.  With new leaders, like a mindless guard dog, it didn’t magically turn into a nurturing parent, it remained a mindless guard dog and attacked and bit the masses but now with a much longer leash since the masses now believed that a dog with a longer leash would spread even more love.  Instead, it now had the freedom to do more of what it was designed to do, that is, attack and bit the masses.

 What I’m getting at is this.  We are now the most anti-social group of humans ever to own the heritage of human DNA, because we live in a society that believes in hierarchies and government as a friend and omnipotent nurturing parent.  Our schools have not taught us life skills and social skills but rather skills of thoughtless obedience and conformity not to small groups of loved ones but rather conformance to the system of hierarchies.  Genetically designed to conform, we feel compelled to go along with this ruse.  However, we find ourselves distrusting of each other and aspiring to climb this hierarchy where we worship celebrities and the wealthy elite on top and many of us would also vote for a psychopathic billionaire or lifelong bureaucrat.  So what the hell does this all have to do with this book?  This book is written by an anti-social introvert, a victim of the system.  I try my best to read at least the first 50 pages of a book or skim the first 100 pages, and then if I still hate the book, I stop reading it.  That was the case here.  I know the author is an introvert, because at the back, I read an interview with the author where she admits hating small talk and hanging out at social events.  This is the hallmark of introverts who simply don’t understand that small talk, while mentally stifling, is the necessary social lubricant for initial social interaction.  You can’t just jump from park to 3^rd gear.  You have to go through the gears with strangers.  People who revel in telling strangers their life story, jumping from park to 5^th gear, are neither to be trusted nor likely to be good company in the long run. 

 As a former introvert, I can tell you that if you continue to shelter yourself from others, you are basically limiting your social sphere and history and influences to your family, often the very family that screwed your head up in the first place.  What better remedy than to replace your family’s social influence than exposing yourself to hundreds of other people who, chances are, are not as negative influence as your family?  Fortunately for me, 90% of the people I’ve met in life are better influences on me than my family, so I have much greater faith in strangers than in my family.  Unfortunately, for most introverts, they will never jump the wall and find this out.  And as such, it seems to me, if you don’t have faith in strangers, you are more likely to believe in a political system whereby government controls strangers, the masses instead of a system whereby strangers, the masses are given much more freedom and self-determination.  As a former introvert, I also happen to know that while you consider yourself of greater moral righteousness than average, because you can observe the masses as one mindless automaton conforming to cultural norms which undermine their individual moral compasses, in fact, you are often the less moral person, because morality in essence, is a system designed to uphold social cohesion, and not having much of a social life, you don’t use this tool as much as you would like to think you do.  In fact, often times, especially in dealing with conflict and argument with others, you would rather do the less moral thing and berate and humiliate others for what you believe is the pursuit of truth. 

 This novel starts out with the narrator murdering her old and ailing mother.  And so begins the untrustworthy narrator.  Such a hip thing these days.  One might argue that killing a sick and old person suffering from dementia is merciful, but the problem here is consent.  If the old person previously consented to being suffocated by a pillow should they suffer dementia and fail to live independently, that’s one thing.  But what gives you the right to decide whether another person should live or die?  If the old person was suffering greatly and there was no chance of a cure, that would also be another thing.  The problem here is that nothing stops the perpetrator from doing it out of self-interest.  Maybe the murderer didn’t like taking care of her mother, wiping off her poop, feeding her, etc.  Maybe she wanted to sell her mother’s house and take the cash proceeds.  In my opinion, morality is based on social instincts.  It’s a cohesive.  It’s a construct designed to make us more socially cohesive, so you should always ask, what is the outcome.  Is the outcome greater social cohesion or less?  A book I just read called The Forest People provided some rather unique lessons in morality and social mores.  If you were wronged by someone, you should pursue justice.  That person should be punished if they wronged you.  However, if you make too much of a loud, boisterous show trying to argue your point, this is actually a worse crime.  The reasoning is that you are creating more of a social problem than the person you are accusing.  Now, obviously, there are all sorts of problems with this, and yes, morality is a fuzzy logic thing.  For instance, a century ago, we discriminated against women, blacks, and gays.  A century ago, if you rallied in support of equal treatment for women, blacks, and gays, you would have received little support, so you would get louder and louder and louder until you become more of a social problem and threat to social cohesion.  Now, of course, you’re saying, so what.  Good for you, screw social cohesion.  But fact was, you would be considered the bad person.  However, if enough people took up the cause and didn’t give in, then a tribal leader might say, look, obviously, a large enough group of people feel wronged, they are making noise and won’t stop, so since there are not enough people to quiet them, we need to give this a second look.  Would giving in to their demands cause greater social conflict than trying to quiet them?  It’s the calculus of morality.  You may not think it’s right for people back in the day to try to quiet those supporting equal rights, but then let me ask you today about people who are arguing to decriminalize all drugs, give animals equal rights, stop eating animals, getting rid of national borders so all humans have equal access to the world’s wealthiest nations? 

 Fundamental to morality is the issue of social identification.  Social instinct makes us compassionate and caring but only to those whom we identify with socially.  In fact, it trumps DNA and species.  A human could easily kill another human who is threatening his dog since the human identifies more with his dog than a strange human.  Ask yourself.  If two people were dangling from a cliff, an American and a Malaysian, who would you save if you could only save one first?  What if it was a Malaysian who spoke perfect English and was attending an American university versus an American citizen whose parents were Indonesian and spoke broken English and lives mostly in Indonesia?  What if it was a Malaysian who was your college roommate versus an American stranger who lived on the other side of the country.  What if you were a 49er’s fan and it was a Brazilian who happened to love the 49ers and an American who was a Seattle Seahawks fan?  Fact is, our social instinct is a double edged sword.  While it makes us more compassionate to those with whom we socially identify, it can also make us especially cruel and vicious to those with whom we do not socially identify.  We dehumanize and vilify them or at least lack any kind of sympathy for them.  How do we feel about radical Islamists who say that all women should be property of men and not allowed to go anywhere in public without her husband?  If a bomb accidentally dropped on his house and killed him, would we care?  How do we feel about a Palestinian kid who lives in a refugee camp and his father was just abducted by Israeli intelligence because someone accused him of giving money to a terrorist organization? 

 In another vein, if you grew up oppressed, molested, abused, the victim of injustice and wrong-doing, would you identify more with a powerful society that is callously helping to arm dictators, or are you more likely to identify with the victims of a dictator armed by your country?  Or how about a robot with artificial intelligence that looks like a human with soft, latex skin versus one that looks like a large insect?  If they had identical programming and identical voices and personalities, which one would you identify with the most?  A lot of people make the mistake of saying that the qualification for equal moral standing is intelligence and the ability to feel pain and suffering.  But fact is, if there was a green blob with greater intelligence than humans with a greater sense of pain and suffering, would we care about that blob over say a human baby?  The only standard for morality is whether we socially identify with someone or something else, and that social identity is based on how much that thing or person can illicit compassionate feelings toward it.  This is based on both instinct and culture.  Instinctively, we do tend to prefer socializing with other humans, although, we are also predisposed to socialize with dogs and cats.  Culturally, we prefer to socialize with people of equal status and demography.  As open-minded and liberal as many people think they are, in truth, they gravitate toward people in their same income bracket and social standing.  A so-called enlightened Manhattanite may tell you that they talk freely with their Cambodian manicurist, Rwandan doorman, Jamaican waiter, or Pakistani cab driver, why don’t they invite them to their high class cocktail parties and art studio openings? 

 So the question here is whether I identify with the narrator, a middle-aged woman who just murdered her mother.  The answer is an emphatic no, and it makes it hard to listen to her talk about her life and thoughts and feelings.  There are two types of introverted author.  One goes out into the world and encounters amazing people who motivate them to write adventurous and amazing stories.  The other stays at home most of the time obsessing over their family lives, pretty much the only social exposure in their lives besides classmates and teachers.  Their tales are pathetic, boring, mundane, annoying, and petty.  While other introverts may praise their novels for putting in words the feelings and thoughts they’ve also experienced obsessing over their own family lives, I don’t read novels to look at myself in the mirror and keep saying, ‘amen’ because someone else feels what I have felt.  I like to experience a new and fresh point of view and experience beyond my own.  The latter is narcissism.  It’s the same as people who use social media not to explore the lives, photos, experiences of others but rather to spread around thousands photos of themselves.  This book is not thousands of photos of the author but thousands of words portraying herself and her state of mind and nobody else’s, including her mother whom she only considers a demented, inconvenient babbling corpse worthy of murder.

Busy Monsters by William Giraldi

Untrustworthy narrators and damaged, dark heroes are all the rage these days. Busy Monsters adds to this a deranged, dangerous dork with a penchant for hyperbole and excessive verbosity. The novel follows Charlie as he loses his girlfriend to a biologist in search of a great squid. He tries to win her back by firing holes at their occupied boat trying to sink it. It reminded me of Oscar Pistorius firing into the door of the bathroom in which his terrified wife hid and was killed. I’m sorry, but when your narrator immediately starts off being a reckless, demented ass, you just sort of lose interest in the whole thing. I am pretty sure the author was on Ritalin or Adderall when he was writing this novel. As a writer and also a user of Ritalin, I can tell. Before Ritalin, writers used speed like Jack Kerouac who was on speed when he wrote On the Road, a nonstop stream of consciousness that was unreadable. There is much to be said for stimulants. For quite some time, I had writer’s block, but fueled up on Ritalin, I was able to break through and write blazing fast and finish three or four books each only taking a few weeks to complete front to back. However, stimulants are like freeways. You can go fast, but you can’t maneuver well or explore new terrain. Hopefully, you’ve thought enough about the unchartered plot and territory enough so that all you’re doing is writing down what is already in your head. In other words, you can’t be all that creative on stimulants. You have to be creative beforehand whether on booze, psychedelics or just plain creative, rebellious, unconventional thinking and musing. But creativity means you don’t want to sit and write it all down. That’s boring. Creativity means you want to think about something new and different and not rehash what you have already imagined and thought. That’s when stimulants become effective in getting you to sit down, three hours at a time and just vomit it all out. I like to say that writing is like purging. It is a release not a push. There’s something toxic and disturbing in your psyche or memory, and you just want to get it all out.

There is nothing particularly interesting or creative about this novel. The narrator just goes off on one ill-begotten deluded adventure after another, a mere variation of theme, and it almost seemed to be ripping off Forrest Gump with all these fantastical journeys while he’s trying to get over his love of a woman. I skimmed the second half of the book. Again, another book written by some nerd dork who probably has to make up all the adventures in his mind, because in real life, he’s too much of a wuss to go out and make things happen. In the novel, he even has to rely on a big, bad Navy SEAL to help him beat up the guy who stole his girl. The narrator reminds me of those annoying asses at bars who talk endless without letting you get a word in and invariably about some long lost love, because the ex too got tired of him talking endlessly and being boring and spitting out beer as he talks. Just annoying. I really hate people like this. Get socialized, get a life, do something adventurous, then write a novel.

The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano

Halfway through the book you learn that there are pairs of prime numbers separated by an even number, but as numbers get larger, these pairs get rarer. Mattia, an awkward genius boy, considers himself and his girlfriend, Alice, a pair of odd prime numbers. They are an oddity in their closeness but always separated. The novel begins with both their separate childhoods. Alice starts off an anorexic skier pushed so hard by her father that one day she falls in a fog and permanently becomes crippled with a leg that won’t bend. Mattia is a twin, but his twin sister is mentally stunted, and one day he abandons her in the park to enjoy a birthday party without her embarrassing company. The novel doesn’t say until later, but you presume she gets lost and disappears forever. Since then, he likes to cut himself to distract him from the guilt. They meet, they separate, la de da.

Most novels, at least the ones I’ve read, are written by introverts for introverts, turtles, as one novel described them. There are two main reasons. First, extroverts tend not to read while introverts do. Reading is a solitary activity. Let’s say for whatever reason, you’re a social outcast and have no friends, or you’re somehow crippled and forced to stay in bed. Reading becomes a natural solution to kill the endless boredom. On the other hand, who has time to read when you’re enjoying the company of friends and family and going off on wild adventures? Second, while some extroverts may enjoy reading and writing, what they wind up writing may not be appealing to introverts. Hence, they comprise a much smaller market share and are often overlooked and ignored.

This makes me somewhat of an oddity. I started out life highly extroverted, but through the grind and dysfunction of my family exacerbated by what I believe to be a negative physiological reaction to milk laced with growth hormones and antibiotics, I became an introvert. After several years of distancing myself from my family, gaining new friends and experiences, discovering alcohol, and also not drinking milk anymore, I became extroverted again. But I still maintained my love for reading and writing which makes me a rare extrovert.

As the one writer said, novels like the bible, are written for losers. The meek shall inherit the earth, the meek shall also find romance and adventure in novels. The only time you actually get to enjoy the tale of an extrovert is when there is a biography about their lives, but often times, you then discover that as extroverted they seem, the fact that they have worked so hard and diligently to become rich or famous means they actually are introverts too.

In this book, Alice is harassed by the popular girls in school, but as far as I recall personally, it wasn’t the most popular girls or boys who were the meanest. In fact, I found them actually to be some of the kindest kids. It was always those right on the edge of the popular group that were the most insecure and the meanest. I call them the gatekeepers. They would distract the popular kids’ attention from them to others trying to get into the popular group or just pick on total outcasts to come across as threatening or cool. There really is no reason for the cutest girls or tallest, most athletic guys to treat anyone unkindly. Then again, that was my personal experience.

While I find this story rather eccentric, interesting, sad, odd, quirky, poetic, and unique, it always makes me wonder what a novel about a really outgoing, adventurous, extrovert would be like. An introvert would argue that it would probably be shallow, trite, banal, cliché, and stupid. Certainly, there are many extroverts out there who are not that smart, creative, or original, but I would equally argue there are many introverts out there who are closet bigots and just as dumb, unimaginative, and unoriginal. I think introverts actually tend to generalize more than extroverts partly to justify their reluctance or inability to make social connections. Who cares if everyone out there is stupid and worthless? But an extrovert, in experiencing so much diversity, cannot fool himself into believing that everyone is the same, unless they’re fake extroverts and instead of connecting socially are probably just being extremely superficial and not really getting to know anyone deeply, but then I would argue that most likely they’re introverts pretending to be extroverts. People often mistake loud, talkative, boisterous, life-of-the-party people as extroverts. Quite the opposite, most are introverts who need to protect themselves with a wall of sound since any social situation is overwhelming to them. The loudest person in the room or party is often the most lonely and antisocial. In fact, although extroversion implies an interest in social activities, these people may actually expose themselves a lot to social activities but just never make any lasting, meaningful friendships or connections. I often think of politicians like that.

This may seem like introversion-bashing, and I’m probably not making many friends in the book community which is overpopulated with introverts, but I honestly don’t believe humans are naturally introverted. Certainly, some are born shier and more reluctant to socialize, but fact is, for hundreds of thousands of years and more going back to our primate ancestors, the pressure to succeed through socialization was enormous. Arguably our large brains are not the result of pressure to hunt and gather intelligently but to navigate the complex world of social interaction. No other animal has develop such a complex array of facial muscles and expressions. Fact is, our social needs outweigh our selfish needs. We are more fearful of public speaking, the possibility of social humiliation and embarrassment, than death. Solitary confinement is so painful and unnatural that extended periods of it is considered inhumane punishment.

When someone is very introverted, often, it’s because something went wrong. Today, I would argue that the toxins in our food and everyday life are physiologically destabilizing, not only causing more anxiety in your behavior but also leading to more autistic children who are afflicted with an extreme form of introversion. Often times, modern parents are not nurturing but more reliant on schools, the Internet, and TV to raise their kids. Modern families are fractured so kids don’t get the constant attention and support of grandparents, cousins, uncles, and aunts.

We crave what is historically rare and take for granted what is historically abundant. As a result, we crave sugar and overlook vegetables. But we also crave privacy and overlook social support networks. For most human history, we have thrived in small social groups full of relatives. We have taken that for granted while craving and overindulging our desire for privacy. Just like going overboard on sugar, we have isolated ourselves in large houses in the suburbs and even left the city where we were raised, leaving behind most of our family. This is just not natural, although we are tricked into believing we crave privacy and overlook social support networks.

I think it’s a societal scam to make people believe that introversion is natural, that it’s okay to be an introvert and it doesn’t mean anything is wrong, because our modern society feeds off introverts. Most things in life, most meaningful things are free, that is, our relationships. As social beings, we derive most of our meaning and pleasure through social connections. But the grand graft is that by studying hard, working hard, sacrificing your social life, you can make a lot of money, then with that money, you can buy a lot of things that make you appear more socially appealing, and then finally at some point, you will be surrounded by high quality, powerful and wealthy people who admire and respect you. Pure bullshit. The more you sacrifice your social life to get ahead and make lots of money, the less capable you will ever be of forming meaningful relationships and being happy. The more likely you will believe that spending more and more money will make you happy and get you that perfect hot wife or billionaire husband or cosmopolitan, intellectually stimulating city friends like Sex and the City or Friends. It’s all a scam to get you to spend a ton, get into debt, and work ever harder for the system.

Everything is an empty distraction from our true desires and fears: wealth, truth, knowledge, power, prestige, fame, glory, grandeur, glamour, glitz, trendiness, brand name accessories, state-of-art gadgets, video games, novels. Sometimes distractions are nice breaks if the path to social connections are hard and frustrated, but other times, they can overshadow what we truly desire. There is an overused narrative in movies and novels, an innocent loner meets a hardened loser, and together, they make magic happen: The Bad News Bears, Scent of a Woman, Kikujiro, etc. The real story is that when any two people work together, they are better and more powerful than two people alone. This is the story of humanity as social beings who took over the world. Unfortunately, the story appears to be ending. We have become psychotically solitary and lonely, mitigated by electronic social networking. At the risk of digressing, I would add one last note. We have a symbiotic relationships with mitochondria, once an independent living archaebacteria that now we cannot live without. We also have a symbiotic relationships with countless bacteria living in and on us, more than the cells in our own body, without which we would also perish. We also have a symbiotic relationship with our DNA. They all communicate with us and influence not only our anatomy and physiology but our psychology, thoughts, and behavior. The more foreign and especially toxic bacteria or material we introduce into our bodies that undermine our existing complex ecosystem of bacteria, the more chaos and damage ensues throughout our bodies, and similarly, our thoughts and behavior become more antisocial and destruction. Studies have shown how bacteria and fungi can take over the minds of ants and mice and actually put them in harm’s way so they get eaten and then excreted. Even humans who live with cats are more at risk of schizophrenia. We fail to appreciate or understand how we are damaging ourselves from bacteria to social isolation and it is reflected in the choices we make, including the choice of political leaders. We fail to appreciate how our choices result in police killing innocent black people and our soldiers and drone pilots killing innocent foreigners. We are at a critical point in human history, where we are upon the precipice of creating a machine with artificial intelligence that can take over every other machine and every human, and if that programmer is antisocial and destructive and fails to appreciate what it means to be a human being, the machine he or she programs will similarly be antisocial and destructive, but in this case, it will take over everything and impose its will upon everything. It can either imprison us as slaves or empower us.

Hotel Du Lac

Written: April 11, 2015

Winner of the Booker Prize. This is the second Booker Prize winner I’ve read. As a writer, the Booker Prize is like the Pulitzer for journalists and the Oscar for actors, but as with all craft awards, it’s really a popularity contest where the judges are basically circle jerking off their own culture and tastes. Both Booker Prize winning books were written by middle-to-upper class English twits using a dying language full of rich vocabulary and literary flourishes. One was a story about a boy’s grammar school days while this one is about a middle-aged woman who retreats to a hotel full of other rich English twits with apparently nothing to do but go traveling and shopping and mingle in obscure upscale hotels. I don’t think this book is a criticism of middle-to-upper class entitled English twits with meaningless lives, but it actually is. It’s like Tropic of Cancer which doesn’t really celebrate this amoral, sexual, pointless lifestyle as much as it seems to criticize it indirectly simply by exposing it.

The author makes an excellent point comparing writing market to the hare and the tortoise. “’Hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game. The propaganda goes all the other way, but only because it is the tortoise who is in need of consolation. Like the meek who are going to inherit the earth,’” The author is definitely a timid, mousy tortoise, and this book is as slow and boring as watching a tortoise. But what does the tortoise think about and observe if not a quickly changing landscape full of diversity and greater threats and opportunities? Well, the tortoise obsessively drools on about a particular mushroom in its path, whatever happens to be right in front of its nose, the dirt, the air, the small details of life, the intricacies, the subtleties, the nuances. And that is exactly what the Booker Prize rewards, this celebration of minutiae, of feelings, senses, objects, people, etc. Yes, there is merit in the minutiae and subtle, the old saying, stop to smell the roses, but just like Buddhism and meditation, it’s a break from life not life itself. Yet, the tortoises live a life full of minutiae that doesn’t go very far and achieves little. Working for a bureaucracy, I know this lifestyle all too well. In my mind, it is a life of oppression, which is sort of ironic in that the middle-to-upper class English twits are supposedly the oppressors, but in that odd twist, those who oppress often are oppressed themselves. The English upper class often send their kids to oppressive boarding schools to toughen them up so that when they graduate, they are well prepared to be oppressors. And above all, amorality and immorality are closely linked to both being oppressed and oppressing as the idiot character Neville represents. “Without a huge emotional investment, one can do whatever one pleases… One can be as pleasant or as ruthless as one wants.” Notice how the English like to distance themselves from reality and themselves with the overuse of the ‘one’ pronoun. If I were oppressed, the only pleasures I might find are in the minutiae, the way an Indian peasant goes scavenging for sellable items in a landfill. I’d rather be a hare thank you very much. Bigger risks, bigger rewards. And to beat the metaphor to death, the tortoise can be slow, because it has a hard shell while the hare’s defense is its speed. The main character Edith is totally a tortoise with a thick, hard shell. In fact, most all the middle-to-upper class English are tortoises who use sarcasm and mockery to justify their boring, introspective, risk-averse lives. In fact, the Hotel Du Lac is one big tortoise shell and a celebration of the tortoise shell, an insular, exclusive, unknown, hidden, discreet, slow-moving, backwards, boring, dull, dusty, old shithole where tortoises can venture a little outside their shells with other tortoises. In fact, England is one big tortoise shell. The Booker Prize is the big tortoise prize for the slowest, most subtle writing around. My writing style is more hare, and as such, besides of course lacking great literary skill, I would never win that silly prize, and that is not sour grapes. Funny to note, at a writing conference, the writers were telling us to slow down while the agents and publishers were telling us to speed up with more dialogue.

“’I was simply thinking how little vice there is around these days. One is led to believe that one can pick and choose, but in fact there seems to be no choice at all.’” Oh pissity, pomposity, oppressive hogwash. I skimmed a lot of the book. It was mostly about Edith observing and briefly interacting with an old woman and her middle-aged daughter and then a flirtation with Neville, a sleazy guy who wanted to marry Edith as an arrangement, since he thought she would be domestic and loyal and not embarrass and hurt him like his previous wife who cheated on him. Edith, the idiot, actually seriously considers it, and in the end, not to give away the ending, she realizes that she’s a tortoise, and without her shell, she’ll get hurt. Interestingly, Edith is also a romance novel writer, but understandably, she writes about the hare’s life from the safe distance of fiction. In the case of the real author, she writes about a fictitious person who writes fiction. How’s that for a shell.
http://www.amazon.com/Hotel-Du-Lac-Anita-Brook…/…/0679759328