June is “pride month” in the US, and it is usually filled with corporations trying to show how forward thinking they are in appealing to the LGBT community. For a while now, I have been thinking that I am part of that community myself. The thing is I am not L, G, B. or T.
The current extended acronym is LGBTQIA+ or Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual, Queer, Intersex, Aro/Ace Spectrum, and + for others. I’m in the A group. Took me a while to figure out where, but I finally solved the mystery:
I’m Aromantic.
What is Aromanticism?
Aromanticism is probably the least popular (less than 1% identify), and least understood sexual orientation, even by the people that are aromantic.
An aromantic is a person who experiences little or no romantic attraction to others. Where romantic people have an emotional need to be with another person in a romantic relationship, aromantics are often satisfied with friendships and other non-romantic relationships.
It is important to note that aromantics do not lack emotional/personal connection, but simply have no instinctual need to develop connections of a romantic nature. Aromantics can have needs for just as much empathetic support as romantics, but these needs can be fulfilled in a platonic way.
It is possible for an aromantic individual to be involved in, and enjoy, a devoted relationship with another person, but these relations are often closer friendships, naturally reflecting the closeness of the two individuals and not a purposely initiated monogamous separation as is often found in romantic couples.
Aromantics may experience squishes which are the aromantic or platonic equivalent of a romantic crush. When an aromantic gets into a relationship that’s more than friends – but less than romantic – that is known as a queerplatonic relationship.
Like all romantic identities aromantics can be of any sexual orientation.
That last sentence is really important. There is a false impression that all aromantics are also asexual, but the truth is most aromantics, are very sexual, and come in all the flavors: Hetero, homo, bi, pan, and poly. And yes, also asexuals.
Here are some of the symptoms of aromanticism. This list is incomplete and just because you have felt some of these does not mean you are aromantic:
You don’t have any desire to be in a relationship.
You experience outside pressure to be in a relationship, but ignore it, or even fear it. The phrase “You just haven’t met the right person yet” gets repeated to you a lot.
If you are in a relationship, you get accused of not loving or caring for that person, because you have no idea how to express it. Most of your relationships end because of it.
Romantic gestures, both giving and receiving, feel awkward and unimportant.
Kissing, cuddling, and other non-sexual touching feel awkward and unimportant.
When you “have a crush” on someone, your instinct is to desire to hang out with them and be their friend (We aromantics call this a “squish” or a platonic crush), rather than a desire to make out, have sex, or be their significant other.
In fact “crushes” involving thoughts of physical contact or long term plans never occur. (aromantic) or very rarely occur (gray romantic).
You have to get to know a person really well before you even start to think about a romance with them (the term is “demiromantic”)
Shyness about asking someone out on a date are not about fears of “What if they say NO?”, but rather “What if they say YES?”
Thoughts of being alone the rest of your life do not really bother you that much.
Aromanticism means you cannot feel romantic attraction. Like any romantic or sexual orientation, it is a part of a person’s nature, and while attraction patterns can be fluid, no one can force their romantic/sexual orientation(s) to change, not even by behaving contrary to those orientations. Dating someone won’t make an aromantic person feel romantic attraction or love. Great sex won’t do it. Even loving someone strongly as a friend won’t suddenly flip the switch in an aro’s brain and lead them to feel romantic attraction. Either you feel attracted to someone in a particular way or you don’t.
There’s a built in contradiction with this orientation. How do you know that you’ve never experienced romantic attraction if you don’t know what romantic attraction feels like? It is a thought that many of us aromantic types try to deal with.
I consider myself aromantic. I have never been head over heels in love or any of that other mushy feelings described by authors and poets. I do feel friendly “squishes” occasionally and I have a normal sexual libido. Is romantic attraction just some combination of the two? Because I have felt that, does that mean I am not aromantic? This is part of the self doubt.
Based on what people say “falling in love” feels like, I can say confidently that no I have never felt this.
Now the romantics will say, “That’s so sad, that is so tragic, to never feel what romantic love is like.”
To me, never feeling romantic love, feels natural and normal, it’s the 99% who are romantics that are the tragic freaks.
The tech battle no one is discussing, because in the end, neither will win.
In 2015, Oculus Rift was supposed to be the beginning of the VR revolution, it wasn’t. In 2016, Samsung Gear VR was supposed to be the beginning of the VR revolution, it wasn’t. In 2017, Playstation VR was supposed to be the beginning of the VR revolution, it wasn’t.
With hundreds of VR games available, VR ready social and building platforms like Sansar and High Fidelity ready for open beta use, and billions of dollars invested in what everyone calls the next big thing, it is rather disappointing that it is not happening. Thanks to a likely big blockbuster in Ready Player One coming to theaters in March, maybe 2018 will finally be the year.
Or not! There are plenty of reasons why VR has not become mainstream. The biggest is the bulky helmets you have to wear, and that most people experience dizzyness or nausea after only about 20 minutes of use. There is a great fix for this last issue that hasn’t been implemented enough: Virtual noses.
But, the biggest challenge to VR mainstream continues to be cost. You can spend $900 for a Samsung Galaxy 8 and Samsung VR headset, or you can spend about the same amount for a Playstation 4 and a Playstation VR bundle. If you want to do VR on your PC, you need around $1400. That’s $400 for recently reduced price the Oculus Rift, and a $1000 required video card.
When did it cost $1000 for a video card?
Why are video cards so expensive? One word: “Bitcoin”. Virtual currencies like Bitcoin have skyrocketed in price over the last year, so much that it is worth building your own computer to “mine” number combinations that fit the fairly simple formula required to create a new Bitcoin (and if you find a combo, you get to keep it). Regular PC processors are not powerful enough to efficiently “mine”, but graphics cards are.
According to sources, one graphics card can “mine” around $5 to $10 worth of virtual currency a day, though the best strategy is concentrate on the small lesser known currencies, as too many other resources are being used to mine the expensive ones. This means your $1000 graphics card will pay for itself in about 4 months, assuming prices stay high enough. But before you invest, consider that you will need a 500W power supply that has to run 24 hours a day, so expect to lose on your electricity bills, too.
The recent trend is that virtual currencies are declining in value, losing half their value in the last two months. If it continues to decline, you won’t make enough to pay for the electricity. Maybe then video cards will come down in price.
My prediction: Both will fail
Despite being friends with both VR pioneers and crypto currency advocates, I have to take the rational position that they are both doomed to fail. VR is the next Kinect, WiiU, 3D TV, or many other trendy “cool” techs that ultimately failed. Crypto-currencies are riding a bubble like “Tulip Mania”.
Advocates of both will insist that they have heard these criticisms before, and my answer is “because they are valid”.
I might invest in VR gear if the price comes down to a decent level. In the mean time, I’m using my graphics card for gaming and 3D rendering.
I try to write something once a month and haven’t gotten around to it this month, so here are some random thoughts.
I have been really tempted to write about the steep decline happening in politics, not just in America, but everywhere these days, but there is way too much material to go through, and most of it is from Russian hackers. So no politics.
Instead, since we are nearing the end of 2017, I thought about writing a year in review piece, and since I’m leaving politics out, I have to limit myself to arts and media so far in 2017.
Bottom line: It Sucks!
Part 1: Music Sucks! Especially American Music.
How much does American Music suck these days? The #1 song for most of the year was in Spanish, by a Puerto Rican, and got 4 and a half billion views. Yes, this one. OK, yes it is a pretty good song. It’s just that songs in Spanish rarely hit the top of the charts, let alone stay on top of the charts for 16 weeks.
OK, there is more music than this one song, and most of it came from all the pop divas who topped the charts the rest of the weeks: Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Ariane Grande, Katy Perry, Lorde, Miley Cyrus, Rhianna, Selena Gomez, Demi Lovato, P!nk, and of course Taylor Swift all had new singles or new albums out in the past year. The overwhelming trend of songs coming from this group of females is an “angry” edge. It’s not a very good trend, in fact in my opinion nobody is doing their best work.
Let’s start with Taylor Swift who released a huge selling album “Reputation” as a follow up to 2014’s “1989”. I listened to both albums, and if I were to pick the best songs over all, I’d mostly pick songs from “1989”. The overall feel of Reputation is dark: angry songs, depressing songs, sad songs. The most lighthearted track is probably “New Years Day” which is more melancholy.
Certainly it is OK for music to be dark, some of the best music ever is dark, but pop is supposed to be fun and exciting. Maybe that is why “Despacito” was so popular. Ironically, the most “fun” song in English this year was a new track by Paramore (welcome back guys), with the not so fun title “Hard Times”.
Anyways, it is not just my opinion that music is getting worse and worse. There are actually legitimate provable reason why pop music is getting worse, and here they are:
These trends are primarily focused on American music. If you want more upbeat pop like we used to have, look elsewhere. Like Japan, who have produced two of my favorite music videos of the year, namely this one and this one.
Part 2: The Golden Age of TV is Over!
For the last 20 years or so, we have been living in a golden age of TV. For those who don’t remember TV before Buffy The Vampire Slayer, well it wasn’t very good. There was the occasional classic like Twin Peaks, X-Files,Babylon 5, and the first 8 seasons of The Simpsons, but most of the TV before 1997 is crap by today’s standards.
The desire for networks to have shows that people would talk about drove them to dump a lot of money into creative peoples laps and create some great TV. The best of which came from Joss Whedon, J.J. Abrams, Ronald Moore, and Bryan Fuller, but others were doing some great work, too. The network golden age died in 2007 with a devastating writers strike, which killed a lot of the better shows, but it continued on with cable and streaming thanks to the TV-MA rating which allowed swearing and nudity and a bit more violence and gore.
2017 seems to be killing that trend as well. Yes, there is still some great TV like Handmaids Tale and Stranger Things 2 being released but it is getting rarer, and the older shows like Game of Thrones, aren’t as good as they used to be.
Part 3: If you are not a “franchise” film, no one will watch you
Part of the problem with the golden age of TV is that we were mostly satisfied with binging series instead of going to movies. In fact, the only films that are really doing well are “franchise” films. As I write this, 9 of the Top 10 films of the year are franchises or remakes, and I’m pretty sure Dunkirk will be taken off the list by either Justice League or Star Wars 8 by the end of the year.
I don’t see any end to this trend. There are at least 6 more “comic book” films scheduled for 2018.
Part 4: Star Wars Battlefront 2 has done serious damage to the gaming industry
There are two things that game players despise: random number generators, and the “pay to win” model of gaming. We are kind of OK when this shit shows up in so called “freemium” mobile games, because we just play for free for a while until it becomes obvious that we need to break out the credit card to continue, and then we uninstall.
I have to believe that this kind of backlash has every single game developer suddenly rethinking strategy in all of their current and future games. Just this same month, my favorite game Guild Wars 2 had its own backlash against RNG type products in their store, and this was just for pure cosmetic stuff, not “play to win”.
The gaming community is getting sick of this crap, and I suspect that they will be voting with their wallet on future purchases. While “gaming” continues to be a growing market, pretty much all the growth is in mobile games. PC and console gaming is actually stagnating, while costs for producing these big “triple A” games go up.
In Summary,
Is the decline in politics somehow causing the decline in the arts? Or is the decline in arts (which has been happening for a while now) causing the decline in politics? Maybe they are just reinforcing each other.
Either way, I wonder if we are witnessing the decline of civilization as a whole.
As my last post documented there is a plague on the internet that is having a negative affect on civilization as a whole. Facebook is the leading cause of this plague, and despite many opportunities, has completely failed to do anything about it. Pretty much every open group has been taken over by trolls and spam and it is impossible to have any intellectual discussion.
Social Media is the New Television
Fahrenheit 451 is a book by Ray Bradbury which is often mistaken as a tale of censorship. In fact it is a tale about how television has destroyed intellectual discourse. I thought about this recently upon reading a couple of different articles.
The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining.” (Emphasis added.) And, Postman argued, when news is constructed as a form of entertainment, it inevitably loses its function for a healthy democracy. “I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?”
Social media not only does this, it makes it worse.
Social media, in contrast, uses algorithms to encourage comfort and complaisance, since its entire business model is built upon maximizing the time users spend inside of it. Who would like to hang around in a place where everyone seems to be negative, mean, and disapproving? The outcome is a proliferation of emotions, a radicalization of those emotions, and a fragmented society. This is way more dangerous for the idea of democracy founded on the notion of informed participation.
I attempted to join a Facebook group that would challenge me intellectually, it didn’t work. In fact it will never work on Facebook. The problem is that there is no mechanism for moderation on Facebook, because it would go against its business model.
Our Changing “Internet” Minds
Second is an article “Are humans evolving beyond the need to tell stories?” which starts with the observation that “novels” are a dying art form, replaced by visual storytelling that is less satisfying to our mental development.
My view is that we’re deluded if we think new technologies come into existence because of clearly defined human objectives – let alone benevolent ones – and it’s this that should shape our response to them. No, the history of the 20th century – and now the 21st – is replete with examples of technologies that were developed purely in order to facilitate the killing of people at a distance, of which the internet is only the most egregious example. Our era is also replete with the mental illnesses occasioned by such technologies – sometimes I think our obsession with viewing violent and horrific imagery is some sort of collective post-traumatic stress disorder.
The article is more broadly directed at tech and internet culture as a whole, and I am not convinced of the thesis, but as I have documented time and time again, the internet does change us and our ability to think rationally.
So stop reading blogs and pick up a book.
TV News is something you don’t need
Facebook is not the source of “fake news” and misinformation, it is the conduit for its dissemination.
TV news should take a lot of the blame for what is going on in society. We watch it because it is the quickest way to become “informed”, but it is not really informing us. Many people have decided that in the age of Trump, TV news is no longer worth watching.
The news isn’t interested in creating an accurate sample. They select for what’s 1) unusual, 2) awful, and 3) probably going to be popular. So the idea that you can get a meaningful sense of the “state of the world” by watching the news is absurd.
Their selections exploit our negativity bias. We’ve evolved to pay more attention to what’s scary and infuriating, but that doesn’t mean every instance of fear or anger is useful. Once you’ve quit watching, it becomes obvious that it is a primary aim of news reports—not an incidental side-effect—to agitate and dismay the viewer.
What appears on the news is not “The conscientious person’s portfolio of concerns”. What appears is whatever sells, and what sells is fear, and contempt for other groups of people.
As I stated in my last post, I blame the media for creating and promoting Trump. I see the exact pattern happening with “Brexit” in Britain, and the rise of the radical right all over Europe. The fear-mongering of the media is creating false fear in the general population.
If you really want to be informed, dig deeper. There are sources out there, find them.
The Need For a Course Correction
I have decided I need a change from this culture of meme and misinformation and troll trash.
For now, I have found it in Reddit, where the upvote/downvote tends to self moderate. There are still problems, especially since a lot of people like a lot of stupid crap, but I have found it to be quite a few IQ points above facebook.
The internet is a big place, and for every problem there are solutions. Reddit is not the perfect solution, but it is a start.
My last post was on happiness, this is the exact opposite.
As you all know by now the US has elected a ultra right wing dictator wannabe who the only hope he gives to continued freedom in this country is that he has no idea what the hell he is doing.
This comes just months after the UK did something extremely stupid and voted to leave the European Union.
Both were campaigns built on lies, both were billed as “protest votes” of the status quo.
Both got their start as internet memes.
Nobody thought the UK would vote to leave Europe, the very idea was ludicrous. At the same time nobody thought an illiterate celebrity would become President of the United States.
And yet here we are. Both results created overnight economic recessions that we may never recover from. The desire to “stick it to the man” is a universal one, but sticking it to the man is not smart when “the man” signs your paychecks.
But don’t think this is isolated to just the US and UK. Awful people and policies are being voted on around the world for the same reasons.
The Role of the Internet Press
Old fashioned media is dying. News today is all about the click bait, paid advertising, and getting eyeballs and email subscribers. The internet is becoming filled with “humor” websites that just rehash lists and funny news stories from two or more years ago (so you forget if you already read it) and turn them into slideshows that slow your internet down with advertisement gifs and videos.
(Personally, if one of these sites publishes something I am interested in, I will just google the title and find the original story sans ads, or barring that, right click and view source and see all the slideshow text right there buried in the code. But I digress.)
The thing is, the news is driven by clicks and memes. If a story can’t generate clicks, it goes unreported.
Brexit generated clicks in the UK, people were fascinated by the idea of Britain without Europe. Eventually they lost site of the fact that it was a really bad idea, but less educated working class thought it might be fun to try something different.
Similarly, Donald Trump generated clicks in the US. For some reason, people have this myth that if we ran government like a business, it would work better, and therefore a businessman should run government. No one bothered to find out that it NEVER works! Every businessman elected to high government office has failed miserably. I give you Governor Evan Mecham as a typical historical example.
It is estimated that Trump got $4 Billion in free air time from the complicit American media. In a campaign season that cost $5 Billion, that is a lot of free advertising.
The media wouldn’t report on Trump so much if it didn’t bring in clicks. TV news got higher ratings with Trump, and internet based news got millions in new ad revenue.
The media is not going to turn that kind of money down in the interest of equal time.
For that reason, I blame the media — all of it, both “liberal” and “conservative” — for Trump’s victory.
The term “meme” originated from the 1976 book The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. The meme is a unit of human cultural evolution analogous to the gene, and like a gene the best ones replicate themselves into human culture.
Memes have always been a part of US politics. From “Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too” to “Yes We Can” the meme has been a major factor in elections. And they are not always positive. “Daisy” was a negative meme that won Lyndon Johnson the White House in 1964.
With the internet, memes find a huge petri dish to replicate rather rapidly into millions, sometimes billions of minds.
What’s novel here is an inversion of control – political memes are no longer rare flashes of uncensored personality or intensely manicured visual messages. They are now born from the swamps of the internet in real time, distributed from the bottom up. They have grown into a form of anarchic folk propaganda, ranging from tolerable epigrams to glittering hate-soaked image macros akin to a million little rogue Pravdas.
Like me, you probably have more than a few Facebook friends who make it their life’s work to circulate political memes in hopes of influencing how you see the world. They are our deadbeat uncles, former co-workers and long-forgotten high school acquaintances. They are agents of nowhere, apparatchiks of nothing in particular. And through the raw power of mass replication, even their most insipid ideas are able to surface from below. By typing some text on an image and sharing it with friends, they too have a voice capable of reaching a critical mass.
The reason why it is now possible for Darryl from Accounting who hates “social justice warriors” to have the same communicative power as a television network is down to the DNA of the medium: speed and lack of gatekeepers. Memes thrive on a lack of information – the faster you can grasp the point, the higher the chance it will spread.
He then links to a Breitbart article written by propagandist Milo Yiannopoulos (a very pro-Trump web site) which explains the use of meme warfare, or as he calls it “Meme Magic” in getting Trump all that free publicity:
Trump’s supporters have treated the campaign as one long trollfest. First Jeb, then Marco and finally Lyin’ Ted all stumbled and fell before the chaotic power of Trump’s troll army. Facing a hilarious combination of in-jokes, YouTube remixes, and Photoshop mashups, Trump’s opponents were subjected to non-stop ridicule from the cultural powerhouses of the web.
The internet made them look stupid. The internet made them look weak. And what begins on /pol/ and leaks out into Twitter has a way of colouring media coverage and, ultimately, public perception, even among people who don’t frequent message boards.
The power of Trump’s branding is partly down to the media’s hunger for drama — but it’s also in large part due to his internet supporters, who have an uncanny ability to create and popularize cultural tropes. Or, as we on the internet have come to know them, memes.
Haddow continues:
At their most basic, meme warfare presented an opportunity for individuals to seize control of the means of media production from corporate interests. It was a viral and open-source medium that would allow individuals to compete for attention against the all-consuming hydra of advertising, marketing and public relations.
This line of thinking was, in retrospect, breathtakingly naive. It assumed that the act of meme generation by a non-corporate entity would be innately good. Like many instances of the tech-centric idealism, it would unravel in spectacular fashion. It’s not that anti-corporate activists were wrong about how the internet could be leveraged to change politics – it’s that they were terribly right.
To Meme or Not To Meme
The success of internet trolling in shaping the debate in this election will go down in history as a watershed moment.
Do we condemn it? Or do we create an actual meme war — debate social issues with nothing but memes devoid of intellectual honesty as long at it infects the viewers brains.
Science and rational, logical thought should be the tools of debate. Meme warfare has undermined rational though in favor of easy tag lines, which are often false (“England is better off without Europe”) or too simplistic and unrealistic (“Let’s build a wall”).
George Orwell was absolutely right! “Newspeak”, the language of propaganda and control, is now alive and well in internet memes.
Memes are a Symptom of Democracy Run Amok
Back in the 90’s I was big into philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle. In Plato’s Republic parts 8 and 9, Plato describes the tendency for different forms of government to morph into others. History has proven Plato right time and time again. His most upsetting is the transformation from democracy to tyranny:
“Can liberty have any limit? Certainly not…By degrees the anarchy finds a way into private houses…The son is on a level with his father, he having no respect or reverence for either of his parents; and this is his freedom…Citizens…chafe impatiently at the least touch of authority… they will have no one over them…Such…is the fair and glorious beginning out of which springs tyranny…Liberty overmasters democracy…the excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction…The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery…And so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty… “
So what does this mean? I’ll explain shortly in more modern terms.
But first, Andrew Sullivan took this as a starting point in an excellent article written in May of this year, which turned out too prescient: Democracies End When They Are Too Democratic
Democracy to Tyranny in the Internet Age
The internet has democratized media, putting every poster, blogger, and vlogger in charge of the news to their followers. This ultimately created “bubbles” of followers who follow their favorite internet media stars to the exclusion of actual researched and vetted information.
These “bubbles” have their own version of reality often very at odds with actual reality: “Obama is a secret Muslim!”, “Immigration is killing our jobs!”, “The government is hiding space alien corpses at Groom Lake!”, “The “rapture” will happen soon so we don’t need to worry about the environment!”
The mainstream media no longer has control of public conscience, and as a result there is no common understanding of “facts”. Civilization requires a common understanding among its citizens.
Once lies become widespread among many bubbles, it becomes a substitute for the actual facts, thus a new fantasy reality is born.
We have self sorted ourselves into different groups who live in different realities and moralities. It is no longer possible for people living in one reality to communicate with members of another reality and convince them of anything.
Eventually, as Plato predicted, one “reality” will become tired of the belittling of its fantasy reality and will seek a tyrant to impose the “new reality” on the unenlightened.
Democracy becomes a dictatorship. Trump has all the qualities of a tyrant, if we let him become one.
The Internet is No Longer a Reliable Source of Anything
Since I wrote this a new chapter has arisen in this drama. “Fake News” is being blamed for Trump. Specifically, Facebook and Google’s complicity in spreading fake news reports without identifying them as fake.
At the start of this series, I mentioned that the internet as it currently stands is predominantly controlled by a handful of websites. Facebook, Google and Wikipedia are among them.
The problem with this consolidation is it reduces what it takes to control the truth. This TED talk explains “astroturfing” or fake grass roots movements to control “research” with marketing.
Facebook is quietly figuring out what to do. Earlier this year it was revealed that Facebook adjusts their “trending” list based on the readers perceived biases. This caused a bit of a conservative backlash which halted moves to expand the program to keep “fake news” from trending. Due to their complicity in creating “President Elect Trump” they will no doubt do something eventually.
As the video above points out, Wikipedia has its own problems with what is truth and what is fake. They are supposed to have their own safeguards, but increasingly it is not working out that way.
And so we are left with a conundrum: Where can we get the truth? An even worse conundrum: How do we survive in a world where the “majority” believes the lies?
My personal life is a bit in chaos right now, and it doesn’t help that here in America we have been going through over a year of added stress with election stuff. I feel I need a reminder of what is REALLY important, and so I am rerunning (and updating) a trio of posts I made a few years ago on the subject of positive psychology and something we all crave: HAPPINESS!
Happiness 101 (Originally posted May 2010)
I learned the secret to life from my cat: Find a comfortable spot, and enjoy.
I think most everyone can agree with this, the problem is that there is often a misunderstanding of what a “comfortable spot” happens to be. Most people think it is a function of money, and stuff. They are wrong, and that is why most people are miserable.
I tend to stay away from real life topics in this blog, but I ran across a bunch of related links on the topic of happiness, and thought I’d share. So here are some thoughts on happiness, and why the things we think will make us happy often totally fail to do so. I will back up these thoughts with random entertaining links.
The American Dream Is Killing Us
I recently ran into a blog post that summarizes everything that is wrong with America. It is called The American Dream Is Killing Us and it points out that our American view of success and how to get it has been wrong for decades now, and yet many Americans (especially “boomers” who actually lived during an era when it was true) still stick to this fiction: With enough hard work anyone can be successful.
That hasn’t been true since the 1980s. According to Professor Richard Wolff in his short documentary Capitalism Hits the Fan, the United States ended its 200 year long employment shortage in the 1980s, and inflation adjusted earnings of the middle class has stayed stagnant. Working harder adds additional costs which lowers net earnings. Since the 1980s, the American worker has been supplementing income with debt and paying interest. The result is we are working harder for less.
The reality is that success requires luck, not hard work. The vast majority of rich people got that way by inheriting wealth, and the vast majority of poor people got that way by inheriting poverty.
Because of our belief that “With enough hard work anyone can be successful”, the rich are praised as good people and the poor are vilified as bad people. This belief is so common and so entrenched in our society, it has literally become the religion of most Americans!
Wax on, wax off, wax on, wax off…
An essay at Cracked.com called How Karate Kid Ruined The Modern World delivers a similar message. The theme of Karate Kid, and many, many other American movies and TV shows, is that anyone can achieve their goals just by wanting it more and working harder than the rest, a theme that fails to resonate in real life.
It seems so obvious that it actually feels insulting to point it out. But it’s not obvious. Every adult I know–or at least the ones who are depressed–continually suffers from something like sticker shock (that is, when you go shopping for something for the first time and are shocked to find it costs way, way more than you thought). Only it’s with effort. It’s Effort Shock.
We have a vague idea in our head of the “price” of certain accomplishments, how difficult it should be to get a degree, or succeed at a job, or stay in shape, or raise a kid, or build a house. And that vague idea is almost always catastrophically wrong.
Accomplishing worthwhile things isn’t just a little harder than people think; it’s 10 or 20 times harder.
It applies to everything. America is full of frustrated, broken, baffled people because so many of us think, “If I work this hard, this many hours a week, I should have (a great job, a nice house, a nice car, etc). I don’t have that thing, therefore something has corrupted the system and kept me from getting what I deserve, and that something must be (the government, illegal immigrants, my wife, my boss, my bad luck, etc).”
I really think Effort Shock has been one of the major drivers of world events. Think about the whole economic collapse and the bad credit bubble. You can imagine millions of working types saying, “All right, I have NO free time. I work every day, all day. I come home and take care of the kids. We live in a tiny house, with two shitty cars. And we are still deeper in debt every single month.” So they borrow and buy on credit because they have this unspoken assumption that, dammit, the universe will surely right itself at some point and the amount of money we should have been making all along (according to our level of effort) will come raining down
All of it comes back to having those massively skewed expectations of the world. Even the people you think of as pessimists, they got their pessimism by continually seeing the world fail to live up to their expectations, which only happened because their expectations were grossly inaccurate in the first place.
Socrates says, the greatest knowledge is to “know yourself”. In defiance of Karate Kid, I think what Socrates meant was: Don’t pretend to be something that you are not. A corollary would be Don’t give a damn what others think of you. Had the Karate Kid taken that advice, it would have saved him a hell of a lot of trouble.
That to me is the “comfort spot”: being true to yourself.
You Can’t Rollerskate in a Buffalo Herd
The solution to these false beliefs regarding effort and success is to redefine effort and success. The correct solution can be found in an old Roger Miller song which has the opposite philosophy as Karate Kid:
You can’t rollerskate in a buffalo herd,
but you can be happy if you’ve a mind to
In other words, you can’t always do everything you want to do, but you can’t let obstacles stand in the way of your happiness.
One person that would agree with that would be Dan Gilbert. This TED video has a lot to say about what really makes us happy. Our brains are bad at predicting what will make us happy, and as a result we tend to make lousy choices. Things that we think will make us happy, turn out not to be so great. Similarly, things that we dread, turn out not to be so bad.
Happiness is a state of mind that can be achieved independently of our circumstances. So regardless of how bad things get, we can choose to be happy if we put our mind to it. Knuckle down, buckle down, do it, do it, do it.
Freedom is not a source of happiness
I took a psychology class where I learned about “cognitive dissonance”. It is a state of trying to hold two conflicting ideas in your head. One example is choosing between two good things, we will tend to regret our choice regardless of which way we choose. Inevitably our choice won’t work out completely as expected, and we will want to go back and choose the other good choice.
Knowing that it is natural to regret our choices makes it easier to accept our choice and avoid regret. Professor Barry Schwartz takes this idea further to conclude that choice itself can make us miserable.
So when life doesn’t go our way, and we find ourselves with limited opportunities, we are actually better off in the long run, even though it may not seem that way.
As the Rolling Stones say:
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try, sometimes, you get what you need.
A final thought
I know what some of you are going to say, “What’s wrong with a little hard work to achieve a goal?” The answer is: Nothing, if the hard work involved is something you actually enjoy doing. Why the qualifying “if” statement? As we have learned above, getting what we want will not really make us happy. Doing something you hate, to gain something you will eventually regret getting, is the exact opposite of happiness. Doing “hard work” you actually enjoy lessens the chances of regret, and gives you a much better sense of accomplishment, even if the rewards are not all that great.
That to me is the “comfort spot”: being true to yourself.
Actually, real lasting happiness is achievable. It is just a matter of learning where real happiness comes from, and pursuing it. Conventional wisdom says it comes from money, and owning lots of stuff, and being a big shot at work, and the whole “American Dream” package. Scientists and researchers in the field of Positive Psychology, will tell you that the conventional wisdom definition of happiness is in fact, full of crap.
In the last essay on happiness, my focus was on what does not make us happy. Freedom of choice is not a source of happiness, nor is outside acceptance. Working hard towards achieving something you want will always fail if you don’t actually enjoy the hard work. Because even if you succeed, it will feel like it wasn’t worth it.
My own attitude pretty much mirrors Barbara Ehrenreich’s attitude in this RSAnimate video. All it is is wishful thinking, and most of the people that engage in it, are wishing for the “American Dream” package that is more likely to make them miserable if it happens by some miracle to work. The secret about “The Secret” is that if it fails you will make yourself miserable, and if it succeeds you will make yourself miserable.
So lets step away from the myth, and take a look at the real science of happiness.
My goal with this essay is to focus on what does make us happy. I want to start off here where I left off last time: Happiness and hard work. There are three reasons why people enjoy their work: 1.) They do something fun, 2.) they work in a fun environment, or 3.) they have a miserable home life and work is a temporary escape. OK, I’m being factitious with that last one, … or am I?
“Meaningful” hard work
Doing something fun for a living does not mean strictly “enjoyable”, it could instead be “meaningful”. In fact it is better if it does, according to researchers:
The relentless pursuit of happiness may be doing us more harm than good.
Some researchers say happiness as people usually think of it—the experience of pleasure or positive feelings—is far less important to physical health than the type of well-being that comes from engaging in meaningful activity. Researchers refer to this latter state as “eudaimonic well-being.”
Happiness research, a field known as “positive psychology,” is exploding. Some of the newest evidence suggests that people who focus on living with a sense of purpose as they age are more likely to remain cognitively intact, have better mental health and even live longer than people who focus on achieving feelings of happiness.
In fact, in some cases, too much focus on feeling happy can actually lead to feeling less happy, researchers say. The pleasure that comes with, say, a good meal, an entertaining movie or an important win for one’s sports team—a feeling called “hedonic well-being”—tends to be short-term and fleeting. Raising children, volunteering or going to medical school may be less pleasurable day to day. But these pursuits give a sense of fulfillment, of being the best one can be, particularly in the long run. (Is Happiness Overrated?, By Shirley S. Wang, Wall Street Journal March 15, 2011 Link).
Moments of pleasure are temporary, fleeting. Our constant focus on these moments can actually make us miserable.
Symptoms of depression, paranoia and psychopathology have increased among generations of American college students from 1938 to 2007, according to a statistical review published in 2010 in Clinical Psychology Review. Researchers at San Diego State University who conducted the analysis pointed to increasing cultural emphasis in the U.S. on materialism and status, which emphasize hedonic happiness, and decreasing attention to community and meaning in life, as possible explanations. (ibid.)
Long term happiness, or as the article calls it eudaimonic well-being, requires a pursuit of purpose to focus our lives around something. Isn’t this what the philosophers and religious figures say? Losing yourself in the service of others, you will find yourselves.
But does it necessarily have to be service to others? In order for that service to be of any value, others must accept it. And yet, as we learned from Happiness 101, seeking the approval of others ultimately leads to misery. Therefore, the meaningful activity we pursue must ultimately be meaningful to ourselves, whether we get appreciation for it or not. So maybe the philosophers and religious figures had it backwards. We cannot lose ourselves, until we find ourselves, until we find our purpose.
Yet, the most meaningful purposes do involve other people. Humans are social creatures, doing meaningful work with others who are doing the same meaningful work is the fastest and easiest way to get close to others. It is not service to others that brings about happiness, it is service with others.
Finding a Purpose
We have been taught all our lives that happiness comes from external stimuli: money, praise, status, material goods, etc. The reality is that it does not. We get temporary joy from obtaining “stuff” but it is always fleeting. In the long run, we are harming our ability for long term happiness in the pursuit of all of these short term thrills.
What will make true long term happiness is the pursuit of “intrinsic rewards”, happiness that we create ourselves:
We crave “satisfying work” or being immersed in clearly defined, demanding activities that allow us to see the direct impact of our efforts.
We crave the “hope of success”, which is more powerful than the actual success. We want to be optimistic about our chances for success in our endeavors, and even if we fail, we at least want to improve over time.
We crave social connections, share experiences and build bonds with others. We most often accomplish this by doing things that matter together.
We crave meaning, or the chance to be part of something larger than ourselves. We want to feel curious, awe, and wonder about things that unfold on epic scales.
The actual details will vary from person to person, but this is what we need to live a happy life, not external material rewards.
Motivating Hard Work
Going back to the reasons people enjoy their work. Lets move on to working in a fun environment. Once again by “fun” I do not necessarily mean just “enjoyable”, I mean work where you really feel motivated to work. There are many misgivings about motivation. The common conception is that money is the driving factor, but as stated above, money is a temporary thrill, but does not make us happy. In fact, if the work is meaningful in other ways, money does not even motivate us at all. Let me just point to a video on this topic based on the work by Dan Pink:
The key point in the video is that there are three factors that lead to better performance and personal satisfaction: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. It is not “more money”, and in fact, contrary to the political right ideology, as long as people are making enough so they do not have to worry about money, monetary rewards do not help motivate at all.
Now we have another conflict between this essay on happiness and the last essay. In the last essay the idea of “freedom of choice” can actually have a negative effect on happiness, and yet in this essay we have “autonomy” as being necessary for personal satisfaction. Aren’t “freedom” and “autonomy” one in the same thing? Not if you understand how they relate to happiness. Autonomy is the desire to be self directed, to pursue a goal creatively rather than by a mindless process. Freedom disrupts our happiness either by not giving us goals to pursue, or giving us too many.
Mastery is our desire to get better at stuff, because it gives us a sense of accomplishment.
We have approached happiness from two different directions and and arrived at the same point. The first lesson taught us that happiness comes from being comfortable with our place in life, the second lesson teaches us that happiness comes from pursuit of intrinsic rewards, giving ourselves a purpose, and pursuing this purpose our own way.
Are these two ideas contradictory? From an abstract point of view, yes they are. How can we be comfortable where we are if we have a purposes to pursue? And yet from a practical point of view, it is very easy to imagine being comfortable with where we are while also pursuing meaningful goals: “comfort” is the foundation for happiness, “purpose” is the destination.
Any questions? Yeah, you in the front row…
“Um, yeah, I got one, …(ahem)… um, your blog is about gaming and virtual worlds? …so, why all this positive psychology stuff? What does it have to do with gaming?”
Actually, it has everything to do with gaming:
Reality Is Broken: A Book Review (Originally published March 2011)
I have never actually done a book review before on this blog, but my previous two blogs I did them all the time. After reading Reality is Broken, I felt compelled to write a full formal review, as its contents are perfect fodder for this blog. In fact there is enough here to fill a good half a dozen blog posts, but then why would you need to read the book? So for now here is a brief introduction to the themes and ideas contained.
Reality is Broken is a new book by first time author Jane McGonigal, a professional game designer. She starts off quoting economist Edward Castronova, who said “We’re witnessing what amounts to no less than a mass exodus to virtual worlds and online game environments.”, then goes on to quote some amazing stats like, the total amount time spent in World of Warcraft by all players adds up to 5.8 million years, and 500 million people spend at least an hour a day in online games for a total of 3 billion hours a week, and the average child will spend over 10,000 hours playing video games before the age of 21, the same amount of time they spend in school from 5th grade to 12th grade.
While many people react negatively to such huge numbers, considering it a waste of time. McGonigal insists that it is not enough, that we should have more people playing online gaming. She believes the world is better off with more gamers. Being a fan of ideas that defy conventional wisdom (as my last two essays demonstrate), I had to find out more. I have a hard time figuring out if Reality is Broken is a book about games disguised as a book about social issues, or a book about social issues disguised as a book about games. I guess if you are librarian trying to figure out where to put the book, this would matter, but for us average readers it does not.
There are basically three themes to this book. The first is the one that resonates the most for me: Games make us happy.
The emotional impact of games is something game designers are very interested in, and spend a lot of money researching, so it is no surprise that many modern video games are designed with making players happy.
Consider what I wrote earlier about “finding a purpose” to our lives. The four types of purposes that bring us meaning and lasting happiness:
We crave “satisfying work” or being immersed in clearly defined, demanding activities that allow us to see the direct impact of our efforts.
We crave the “hope of success”, which is more powerful than the actual success. We want to be optimistic about our chances for success in our endeavors, and even if we fail, we at least want to improve over time.
We crave social connections, share experiences and build bonds with others. We most often accomplish this by doing things that matter together.
We crave meaning, or the chance to be part of something larger than ourselves. We want to feel curious, awe, and wonder about things that unfold on epic scales.
Now consider these four categories of “purpose” in the context of playing video games. Almost all games can hit 2 or 3 of those, and the MMORPG can hit all four categories. From a positive psychologists stand point, gamers are some of the happiest people on the planet.
I know what some of you are thinking. Is the happiness you get playing in virtual worlds just virtual happiness? frivolous, fleeting and temporary?
No, not according positive psychologists. Dan Gilbert himself says there is no discernible difference between synthesized happiness and real happiness. See the video posted earlier.
Which leads to the second theme of the book: Gamers are escaping from a broken reality. McGonigal list 14 ways that gaming worlds are superior to real worlds. She is not talking specifically about online video games at this point, but many different kinds of games that help us deal with reality. The majority of the book is about these 14 “Reality Fixes”, and as she goes through each one she discusses two or three different games or gaming systems that encourage these reality fixes. She discusses dozens of different games, some I am familiar with, some I’d love to play, and some I do not.
Anyone looking into game design should read the book if nothing else than for the various ideas that are likely to come to mind while reading. I came up with an idea myself while reading, and have gone as far as researching some special programming I would need to do to get it to work. More on that later, maybe.
And finally the third theme: Games can save the world, and gamers are our best resource to do just that.
Games can, and have been designed to help us focus on real world issues. McGonigal is a game designer who works primarily on a category of games know as Alternate Reality Games, or ARGs, which are designed to form communities and tackle problems, primarily problems created by the game authors, but they can also tackle real world problems like “peak oil”.
In 2007, McGonigal was part of a design team for an experimental ARG called World Without Oil. The original 1,900 players from all walks of life did not find any solutions, but came away mostly optimistic that people can come together in a crisis and adjust their lifestyles to fit new realities. Since then McGonigal has been part of other socially conscious ARGs, and is confident that games like this can one day change the world. But in order to make these world changing games to work, we need gifted people to play them. Enter the “gamers”.
She discusses the fact that more than half of the students today spend 10,000 hours playing games before they turn 21. That by definition, that makes them “virtuosos” at gaming. The biggest question is what are all these “virtuosos” capable of? She breaks down 4 qualities that long time gamers possess:
Blissful productivity — the understanding that happiness comes from hard work and not from passive activities like watching TV.
Urgent optimism — the desire to tackle an obstacle combined with the belief that there is a reasonable hope of success, or desiring the “epic win”.
Social fabric — the ability to form tight communities built on trust, like guilds.
Epic meaning — the desire to be part of something bigger than themselves, even if that bigger thing may just be fictional. Notice that these four qualities correspond to the four “categories of purpose” listed above.
McGongal’s goal is to find a way to focus the talents inherent in gamers to tackle the problems the world face today and “fix reality”.
I have not decided how true the thesis is. Being a gamer, an amateur game designer, and a participant in ARGs, I at least understand the thesis. I want to believe the thesis is true, but understanding the worlds problems and finding solutions is unfortunately a fraction of the problem. Experience is that all new ideas that diverge from the “business as usual” tends to face overwhelming political opposition no matter how good or true they are. The corporate powers that be seem to think that video games are a form of soma to pacify the masses into complacency, and I am not sure that they are wrong.
At the very least I accept the first theme: Games do make us happy, and I mostly accept the second theme: Games are an escape from reality.
But it is important to keep all of this in balance. McGonigal concludes her book:
Reality is too easy. Reality is depressing. It is unproductive, and hopeless. It is disconnected, and trivial. It’s hard to get into. It’s pointless, unrewarding, lonely, and isolating. It’s hard to swallow. It’s unsustainable. it’s disorganized and divided. It’s stuck in the present.
Reality is all of these things. But in at least one crucially important way, reality is also better. Reality is our destiny. This is why our single most urgent mission in life is to engage with reality, as fully and as deeply as we can.
That does not mean we can’t play games. It simply means that we have to stop thinking of games as only escapist entertainment.
Good games can play an important role in improving our real quality of life. They support social cooperation and civic participation at very big scales. And they help us lead more sustainable lives and become a more resilient species.
Games don’t distract us from our real lives. they fill our real lives: with positive emotions, positive activity, positive experiences, and positive strengths.
Games aren’t leading us to the downfall of human civilization. They are leading us to its reinvention.
Too Long; Didn’t Read
So is the whole point of all of this that video games make us happy so we should just play video games all day?
Well, no it isn’t. The point of all of this is that what we think makes us happy and what really makes us happy are often very different things.
Things we think will make us happy are never as good as we like, especially if we spend a lot of time and effort we don’t enjoy to get it.
Things we think will make us miserable are never as bad as we imagine them to be.
So stop stressing. Stop worrying that you made the wrong decisions. Find a comfortable spot, and enjoy.
I’ve been writing about how Internet has been affecting society for a couple of years now. One angle I have not touched on is that it is affecting younger generations way more than older generations.
Kids raised on the internet are now in their 20’s and early 30’s and their understanding of the world is radically different than generations before.
Social scientists in the US like to artificially divide Americans into “generations”. There are three dominant ones today: The Boomers (those that grew up in the 50’s and 60’s), Generation X (those that grew up in the 70’s and 80’s), and the Millennials (those that grew up in the 90’s and 00’s). I am part of Generation X, the smallest and least powerful of the three.
All three generations have their technical savvy and non technical members, so what I am about to say is a generalization and not true of everybody:
Boomers are generally conservative and Christian. They love the suburbs, and beer, big houses, and driving trucks or SUVs, and watching cable TV.
The “average” Boomer is online but rarely use the internet. They do email and Facebook and Wikipedia and a few select sites. It is a small part of their lives, and a lot more of their time is listening to the radio and watching TV, because that is what they have done all their lives.
The “average” Millennial is online practically all the time, thanks to smart phones and tablets. They are very internet savvy, and practically live online. It’s where they work, its where they go to school, it’s where they play, it’s where they meet people. The internet is their world view.
In between is Generation X, the “average” is hard to pin down because it is so widespread. It is somewhere between. Gen X grew up before the internet like the Boomers, but has a stronger adoption rate than they do. Most of the big names involved in creating the Internet are Gen X, but this recent video of celebrities that are clueless about the internet contain mostly Gen X celebrities.
Some Gen Xers like myself think and live like Millennials, and some think and live like Boomers, and as a result our generation really has not developed its own identity other than our affection for console gaming.
The internet savvy Millennials are 100% in control of pop culture today, while politics is controlled by the former hippies now ultra conservative Boomer generation. The fact that the Millennials do not seem to care about race, religion, sexual orientation, and are socially liberal on issues regarding sex, drugs, and punishment is hopeful, but their near universal apathy towards politics is worrisome.
Shifting Demographics: What Election 2016 is REALLY All About!
As I write this, the status of election 2016 is that Donald Trump is, barring a party coup, going to be the GOP nominee, while Hillary Clinton is probably going to be the Democratic nominee, but Bernie Sanders continues to be a thorn in her side.
The next President of the United States is going to be a “Boomer”, and it is safe to say they will be the last “Boomer” President (Bill Clinton and George W Bush were both Boomers, too, Barack Obama is Generation X)
Conventional wisdom says that generations are always liberal when they are young, and get more conservative as they age, and that is a true trend in history, but there has never been a generation quite like the Millennials:
Only 21% of Millennials are married, while 42% of Boomers were married at their age;
Almost 1 in 4 (23% to be exact) have a Bachelor’s degree or higher, making them the most educated generation (more demographic breakdowns of college graduates can be found here);
Millennials are the most ethnically and racially diverse generation, with 19% being Hispanic, 14% African-American and 5% Asian;
Millennials are the most diverse, highest educated, and least likely to have a traditional family. The odds are pretty good they are going to be the most socially liberal generation ever. It also does not help that Boomers are driving Millennials to embrace democratic socialism.
Bernie Sanders is a proven Liberal, who has run his campaign towards appealing to Millennials, and has succeeded. Many of the media wonder why he stays in the race even though his chances of a nomination are quickly approaching 0%. The answer is he is grabbing the youth and exciting them into politics. Sanders knows that Millennials are the future of this country, and it is time they take an interest in their own future.
Regardless of the outcome, Sanders’ message is going to win in the long run. Sanders is too old to run again, so this is his one shot. Ideally, some young Sanders supporters will start running for office and start challenging the Boomer status quo.
These books took the early networking tech that was already developing at the time and expanded on it, thrilling our imaginations with future worlds we could only dream about.
Today we no longer have to imagine, the “cyberpunk” world has become our reality. These authors got a surprisingly lot of ideas right. They also got many parts wrong, so reading these books today feels anachronistic.
One thing these books got wrong is that their heroes had unusually good prowess with digital information, and that prowess usually saves the day in the end. Prowess with digital information is proving not to be unusual at all, in the Millennial generation and whatever we are calling the generation after it (why not call it the cyberpunk generation?) prowess with digital information is the norm.
I saw my 2 year old nephew sit at a computer with a mouse and point and click away on a game as easily as a fish takes to swimming. I didn’t even see my first computer mouse until high school.
Kids today are creating a new digital society and have little interest in preserving traditional ways. This is a world wide and nearly universal trend among the younger generation vs the “cold war” world view of their parents and grandparents.
The “fears” of the older generations are driving politics right now, but personally I’m excited about the changes.
The digital age is not a perfect one, but that’s another story. No age has ever been perfect.
June is “pride month” in the US, and it is usually filled with corporations trying to show how forward thinking they are in appealing to the LGBT community. For a while now, I have been thinking that I am part of that community myself. The thing is I am not L, G, B. or T.
I have never actually done a book review before on this blog, but my previous two blogs I did them all the time. After reading Reality is Broken, I felt compelled to write a full formal review, as its contents are perfect fodder for this blog. In fact there is enough here to fill a good half a dozen blog posts, but then why would you need to read the book? So for now here is a brief introduction to the themes and ideas contained.
