"Dear Peter Wiggin: This is to inform you that you have received enough upvotes on your Reddit comment to become president of the world. Please be at the UN tomorrow at 8:00 AM sharp."
I think we all sort of believe, deep down, that this is possible.
Now imagine performing live under the big top. Being a clown on a political blog is just methadone compared to the pure heroin of genuine clowning in a genuine circus tent. Filled with complete strangers, yes, but still such a goddamn rush.
I truly believe that if I write a comment that is liked at least 250 times on Slow Boring, I'll *at least* get a call tomorrow from Kathleen Kingsbury.
Huh. Had to look her up. Opinion editor at the NYT.
I'd say that her record of finding interesting and intelligent perspectives on politics is...not so good, to judge by their suite of writers. I know, she's new, and probably inherited some of the old names. But I simply would not have taken the job unless given carte blanche to fire Maureen Dowd, Tom Friedman, David Brooks, and a bunch of the other deadwood.
Friedman and David Brooks are both as insightful as anyone, as is Ezra. Douthat and David French are both first rate and interesting. MacWhorter is great. Kristof has his moments. And while I haven't read that many of her Times columns (and haven't really loved the ones I did), I was a huge fan of Zeynep's Substack.
Losing Krugman was a blow. I think there is a good argument to be made that he's been far and away the most valuable opinion columnist of the 21st century; the combination of his economics knowledge, the clarity of verve of his writing, and his ability to write quickly is unmatched. That said, while I'm a definite fan of his Substack, it's been interesting to me that its quality has not been quite as high as his Times writing. My sense is that he did benefit from editors challenging him.
Heh. I haven’t spent any time in the comments there. But it sounds like the opposite of the Free Press, where there are lots of interesting pieces (admittedly amid some dreck as well) but with commenters that are mindlessly knee jerk folks from the right.
That’s great. When I was in grad school, the math department had a student talk series called “Many Cheerful Fact”, though most of them were not about the square of the hypotenuse (and didn’t even contain news about binomial theorem).
I often think it's comical, fal la la, &c, that every boy and every gal that's born into this world alive is either a little liberal or else a little conservative.
A while ago, maybe even in your later Vox days, you wrote about how regaining an internal locus of control goes a long way towards grounding good mental health, and honestly it's some of the best info/advice I've read and it's really stuck with me.
"Trying something else" really reinforces internal control because it shows that you really can just do things. Doomscrolling does the opposite because it fixes your attention on things far behind your control, and if all you do is fixate on things beyond your control, your entire life is going to start feeling out of control, and your mental health will be impacted.
For me, the last two years I've started regularly exercising (lifting, then running), meditating, and drinking less. Lo and behold I feel much, much better about things.
Also I hear you're on deck for the CHH podcast. Glad to see you doing your part to elevate the Joe Rogan of the Left.
"Try something else" is underrated in a lot of areas. Parenting is another one where you can see people try the same approach over and over despite constant failure and seemingly unable to imagine there might be alternatives to try.
I think there is something pretty hardwired in our human psyche for that. Consider that we used to live in smallish tribes where nothing ever changed so no one ever had to do anything differently.
Just successfully got my daughter to go to sleep without putting up a fight every night recently by trying something else. 10/10 would recommend for parenting.
We got ready for bed ourselves and were kind of performatively tired, but let her pick when she went to bed. We were only going to keep it up if she picked reasonable times, but in a few days she’d immediately say she was ready for bed once I started getting ready for bed.
Alternatively, you can just quit Twitter. Loads of people criticize Bluesky for being too quiet or too liberal, but honestly I kind of like that it's quiet. The discourse on X is actively hostile.
I was skeptical initially, but I eventually gave up all social media (aside from occasional comment sections of newsletters) and feel like it did me a world of good. I thought maybe just going to Bluesky exclusively would be enough, but cutting ALL of it out has really made a difference.
It’s confusing to me why anybody wants to *watch* a *podcast*. I think the whole point is that it’s something you do while cleaning, driving, or exercising! But it does seem like the big ones are on video now.
“Relatedly, the longer that I cover politics the more I have the sense that a lot of people are asking the political system to accomplish things for them that are really outside the scope of public policy.”
This has been my sense of things for a decade now.
A lot of things have come within the scope of public policy in the last century or two that were clearly outside of it before. Things like access to medical treatment and education, product safety, and environmental quality. I suspect this has subconsciously led people to demand further increases in scope of public policy, even beyond its abilities.
(Most of these expanded capacities of public policy are related to changes in technology and social organization. I can’t tell if any such changes have taken some things out of the domain of public policy that used to be there, but there may well be some.)
How many of our problems in America are because the Constitution is both a) groundbreaking for its time and b) a quarter-millennium-old document that simply doesn’t consider the expectations that 21st-century Westerners place upon their governments?
1. Medical treatment has been the subject of public policy since ancient times, mostly through public health as there was not much medical knowledge per se.
2. Same thing for education, honestly.
3. Same thing for product quality. We have regulations on food going back to the ancient world, for example.
4. Same thing for environmental quality. We have regulations on emissions, noxious odors, dumping waste, and so on going back to the ancient world.
What I see is that people want the government to do things like enforce their perceived status when it can’t. I know it can’t because… say it with me… we have regulations on this going back to the ancient world.
They have never done anything like work. Ever. Period.
These things are outside the scope of public policy not because public policy can’t contemplate them but because we’ve learned that public policy isn’t really able to achieve those ends.
1. Medical insurance didn't exist before about a century and a half ago, and now it is the primary form of public policy interventions in medical treatment. Maybe some other public policy interventions existed that technically fall under "medical treatment", but there has been a drastic transformation in the past century or two.
2. Publicly funded K-12 education, and university education, didn't exist two centuries ago, and they are now the primary form of public policy interventions in medical treatment. Maybe some other public policy interventions existed that technical fall under "education", but there has been a drastic transformation in the past two centuries.
3. Maybe there was public regulation of food quality, but if so, it applied only to the small minority of food that was consumed by people other than the ones who produced it. And I am not aware of any regulation as detailed and significant as, say, car safety regulation, or lead paint regulation, before the early 20th century.
4. Again, a few such regulations may have existed in some times and places - but they were nowhere near as significant as modern ones, and they weren't targets for public demands of regulation for most of history. Even in the early 20th century, in the few liberal democracies that existed, there was very little regulation of air, noise, or light pollution, or public conception that this was something that could be demanded.
Also, citation needed on the claim that no regulations of social status have ever worked. These regulations have taken very different forms in very different societies, raging from prohibitions on the presence of women in public, to rules about who can wear what clothing, to support of the arts.
Health insurance started with hospital plans in the 1930s and was preceded by mutual aid societies, which fulfilled a similar function but without the financial structure. Health insurance, as opposed to medicine generally, only entered public policy in the relatively recent past because it's a specific technical innovation within the financial world driven by the collection of health data thereby enabling an actuarial accounting of morbidity.
Publicly-funded K-12 didn't exist two centuries ago because the K-12 concept itself didn't exist two centuries ago. We have always had publicly funded education, though, going all the way back to government creating scribal and religious schools.
Food quality regulation was mostly about things the vast majority of people consumed. It was considered less in terms of public health than in terms of the producer's immorality.
I dismiss out of hand that our ability to figure out what we need to regulate how using the technical tools available to us represents a change in kind. It's still driven by the same concerns over sickness, ritual cleanliness, and so on.
You clearly know about sumptuary laws, so I suggest you look into them further. They all end the same way: nearly universal non-compliance or fashion shifting to things not covered by them as wealth-but-not-noble people adopt them. You can also look up fashion and fashion-policing in the Soviet Union. You can also look into the history of the hijab.
This is my last reply to you anyway. I don't like people saying "citation needed", it presumes we're all still in undergrad having freshly learned what we're talking about. It's a scourge upon discourse.
It's a sin for which I have never and will never forgive Randall Munroe.
Edit: oh shit that’s me. My “do something different” is going to be changing my Twitter password, writing it down, then throwing away the slip of paper sometime next week after we release the NYC poll we’re running. Just say no to Hitler.com!
I enjoyed this piece (and ironically enough am here to comment this early specifically because I got up to slog my way through a book club selection -- Michelle Huneven's "Jamesland"), but from a copy editing standpoint I would suggest italicizing book titles or at least putting them in quotation marks.
I say that because this statement:
But several of the Victorian novels that I’ve read that do have such themes, like Shirley and Eliot’s Felix Holt . . .
made me think Shirley was a co-author of "Felix Holt" and I spent the rest of the piece wondering who Shirley was until I got to the second endnote and learned that it is a Charlotte Bronte novel.
Yes, I go to a second Catholic Church and talk to all the old folks there and engage them where they are at. I guarantee you talk to an old person you've never met and both your days will be improved 100%.
I'll honestly and earnestly politely chat with any stranger I meet and have an enjoyable interaction.
I'll be going back to grad school in the fall for a counseling degree (can't believe it's costing $60k!); lots of annoying young people to engage with. What a challenge!
Folks who aren't sharing or aren't willing share good values I offer to them for free (love, earnestness, joy, contentment, kindness, grace, charity), I shake the dust off my proverbial sandals and go find a new stranger to share these values with. I try to be lavish.
Just curious — what’s the significance of “second”? Is “second Catholic” a sect of Catholicism? Or do you go to your own church first and then to another one as well? Not enough old folks in the first?
Just like anything else, heavy users of Catholicism sometimes need to up their dosage to stay level. And since Vatican 2, the amount of Catholicism in a single service is simply not enough to meet the needs of those who are most profoundly effected.
My IRL habit that I picked up was an assist from my uncle, who had the wisdom to get some friends together every Friday morning and go shoot the shit at a coffeehouse. He had always urged me to come join, but I really didn't get the wisdom behind it in my youth until later. It's a nice way to get some talk in on everyday happenings going on in the community and the world. About the closest thing this atheist can get to church.
It is notable that I (along with Matt and I presume most Slow Borers) are odd in that the internet *has* been a help in transcending the limits of physical space to form connections with other people around ideas and interests. There have been several other online communities I've been a part of that's been all about gathering around common interests, and I've made lots of good friends through that, plenty that I've met IRL along the way. Sure, there's been the inevitable toxicity along the way, but many years of experience have taught me how to avoid that.
And on that note, it was funny talking about this with a longtime online friend last month, because we both felt that people hadn't learned lessons that we learned a long time ago about how to navigate the internet. We agreed that that's why we both found Zuckerberg properties to just be terrible. My Twitter usage has also been unusual: never tweet, only calibrate it to read actually useful information. I've always instead gravitated to forums like this one, perhaps why most of us have found ourselves here anyway.
I've argued politics and policy on a lot of other places in the past, and I mostly enjoyed it, and the discourse was way better than the typical Facebook post, but it still hasn't been as good as here.
SlateStarCodex/AstralCodexTen are one of those places for me. In recent comment sections there, I’ve seen a lot of self congratulation about how good the discourse is there, and I’m constantly thinking how much worse it is than here. But it truly is better than many other places.
It makes me wonder how to get it even better than it currently is here.
SB has an outstanding comment section. Here are two problems I see:
-whenever we start talking about gender dynamics, parenthood, how should Democrats win over men, etc. things can get... weird (I'm sure doubly so because there are relatively few women commenters)
-new and unimproved since November 2024: the is/ought distinction that breaks commenters into two camps, the "sh*t is effed up, why don't more people care" camp and the "welp they don't care and you can't make them, so focus on winning hearts and minds rather than holier-than-thou-moralizing" camp. People from the two camps start talking past each other and it leads to unproductive shouting (see also the related "we gotta move to the center" vs. "if we're just gonna be Republicans Lite Minus The Fascism, why bother even being Democrats")
Not sure how to solve either problem other than more active moderation?
It’s like Georgists and the Land Value Tax, or Abundance bros and housing, but if they were arguing for an idea with the intellectual firepower of tariffs and rent control.
I host the apparently sought-after these days weekly dinner party with friends, and have kept it going for over a decade. It’s such a pleasant and grounding tradition.
I got de-boosted for not getting verified (I was never particularly popular on Twitter, but I would regularly get several hundred likes for a good reply, and now it’s rare for me to get one).
Ironically, it’s made my Twitter experience much better. I no longer get an adrenaline rush from seeing a tweet take off. I don’t get into arguments because I don’t have the thrill of an audience. I mostly read the feeds of the handful of people I really like, and maybe retweet an article I find interesting. Then I get bored and log off.
Burning question I have about the swim practice reading: do you leave your phone in the car or something, or do you just have the discipline to stay with the book instead of breaking to scroll?
I constantly read books on...my phone! I love that I can start reading whatever book anywhere at any time and personally, I don't have any problem with getting distracted from it. Actually, the problem is the opposite. Sometimes, I'll start reading on my phone and then look up and realize I've been sitting in my vehicle in the parking lot for 2 hours reading a book.
I guess I'm weird, but I've always found "scrolling" to be so mind-numbingly boring that I would never have to worry about leaving my phone behind for the temptation. I don't wait around at swim practices myself, but for my daughters' swim meets I just watch the whole thing because its usually interesting enough on its own (other than the diving, which is pretty dull imo). I would probably bring a book and read it in some circumstances, but I'd also feel like an awful nerd for doing that, and would likely get called out by my daughters to top it off.
This post really hit me in the feels today. Just a really solid post, and I think it also hits on people's desire to be happy even if some of us are deeply unhappy on the inside and how they are processing those feelings in a negative way via a political process that destroys and doesn't build.
One of my favorite quotes is from Rebecca Solnit and is;
"To be hopeful means to be uncertain about the future, to be tender toward possibilities, to be dedicated to change all the way down to the bottom of your heart."
Change has to come from inside us first, before we just yell at society to change on Facebook, Twitter or vote for candidates who generally are terrible or support tearing things down instead of making them better for all of us. We have to get some sense of collective back if we want to survive.
Matt writes: “ I think the basic issues that I’m wrestling with on this journey — digital media brain rot, post-pandemic disruptions to our habits, male friendship, parenting — are probably things that a lot of people are dealing with.”
Golf! Almost anyone can become proficient enough to play in 4 hours or less; the handicap system allows all levels to compete; there is sufficient (but not too much) time to converse; beer is allowed during play. It is the perfect pastime for guys and gals alike. To be fair, it is tougher for those who prefer city living over the suburbs.
This is intended more as anecdote than "you are wrong":
I lived in SE Asia for a decade and the golf experience there is dramatically different from what Americans/Australians/etc think of as golf.
First off, land is scarce so course fees are exorbitant. This is compounded by the low wages so only rich people (i.e. price insensitive) golf, which probably drives up fees even more.
It is scorching hot and humid so if you want to play 18 holes you need to wake up at 3am to drive an hour to the course outside the city for your 4am teetime to be done before the heat really sets in.
It is a stereotype that Asians bet on everything but... There will be betting on golf. And since only the rich play the entry level is usually a few hundred dollars over a round.
Everyone sand bags. Everyone. Because hierarchy and saving face is a stereotype in Asian culture but it isn't wrong. If you're playing with a potential customer, you need to lose. It's called "customer golf".
And 80% of the women who golf are someone's mistress or former model trophy wife (see above: only the rich can afford to golf), so "regular" women are definitely hesitant to join in. Plus highly likely to be the only woman in a fairly sexist foursome on the course.
Growing up in the rustbelt midwest, my experience was the obverse of yours. Everyone played golf, public courses were everywhere, it was low-key competitive. I was not great at it (to say the least) but it was fun. Playing badly with more-competitive adults was less fun, so I haven’t played in years, but I think John’s point is a good one.
That's interesting! I definitely never felt like golf was a thing I might do to meet people and have fun. The income it takes to participate definitely excludes me, but I'm not longing for it much in the first place. I don't think I have much in common with most golfers.
I've met most of my real life friends at the dog park or in my apartment building.
I was taught to golf by an uncle who told me it was important for every young person to be just barely worse at golf than their boss. 'Customer golf' manages both up and out.
Not a pastime but for connections, my church choir is great. They do help me remember what people who don't pay a lot of attention to politics are like and to imagine how normal people would be affected by my "everything must change so that everything may remain the same" ideas.
I just picked up golf this spring! Talk about "trying something new"--it is deliciously humiliating. I've always veered toward activities I show a natural proficiency at, so learning how to golf has been humbling in the best way, really breaking me out of my mold.
My mastery of the English language improves a bit after my second cup of coffee. My original comment was composed prior to completing my first, I'm afraid.
I meant that even a bad golfer or beginner can make their way around the course in 4 hours or less. Definitely not that one can become proficient in 4 hours. Proficiency takes at least 4x10¹² hours.
I recently walked a course for the first time in twenty years with some coworkers who are actual golfers. I warned them in advance I couldn’t really play, mostly hit the 7 iron, and picked up my ball frequently to advance play (just dropping near them when they got to short game). It was actually really fun, but most people might not have my tolerance for being so publicly awful haha.
Yea I grew up outside Palm Springs with state champions and spent much more than 4 hours golfing and am still embarrassingly bad to the point that I basically can’t golf with anyone remotely serious.
Trying to figure out the right age to introduce my daughter (currently 4). I’ve hit a many a bucket of balls with my dad in my youth, it’s an absolute blast.
I've found Oren Cass worth reading because I think his point about trade's role in the decline of factory jobs and the blow that inflicted on American society is valid. At the same time, I think Noah Smith's response (https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-anti-economists-have-overreached/comment/121733490), that regardless of trade, those jobs were going away eventually is real. And AI is almost certainly going to accelerate this process for everyone.
Which is a long prelude to saying that I think that the need for people to find meaning and relationships outside of work is only going to become more and more important. And I fully agree with Matt's point that people need to find it outside the realm of social media of well.
Where I think this piece goes a little off track is the belief that people will find these things by leveraging the power of the internet to find their people and their niche. Instead, in a world where most people aren't religious (and therefore are unable to take advantages of the collective meaning making opportunities that good churches and other religious institutions offer), I'd suggest we need a new set of civic institutions and membership organizations that can offer opportunities for people to work together to do meaningful things.
Been reading Robert Putnam's The Upswing which talks about how American society was revitalized in the first half of the 20th century through the creation of orgs like Rotary, Lions, PTAs, unions, that offered these outlets. Think what modern society needs are both a new or revitalized set of these types of collective orgs but also some societal changes that make participating in them both easier and more expected. Participating in meaningful stuff has lots of moments of friction whereas TV and the internet always offers a frictionless way to spend your time that is fun and engaging. But these are ultimately empty calories. Choosing the ultimately more rewarding path is partly about self-discipline, but it's also about making the more meaningful choices easier to find and engage in as well as society sending the message that it's important.
Yeah, I’m curious about how and why those organizations worked. I’d add Masons, Odd Fellows, and Shriners, as well. Some of them worked pretty well, too. So, what combination of factors did the trick? How much was it mere socializing, how much was it tied into your professional advancement, how much was it oriented toward the ostensible purpose ( eg kids hospitals for Shriners).
I suspect these were all somewhat conservative in membership, de facto, but also kept explicit politics at arms length: they were not political action groups. And perhaps that helped them provide other kinds of community?
Honestly (and sadly), probably the fact that back in the 1950s they didn’t have to compete with social media, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ or video games?
When my husband and I were at the No Kings rally on Saturday (ours was one of those where everyone was lined up along a major thoroughfare), he noticed that older folks seemed a lot more open to chatting with strangers than younger people. I’m afraid social media is having this effect, making people afraid to open their doors or answer phone calls (of course the latter being a rational response to the proliferation of spam calling).
I'd say rapid industrialization and urbanization brought a bunch of people together into cities in the second half of the 19th century, then the progressive movement (the original one) gave them a lot more free time in the first half of the 20th, and since there was very little in the way of 'mass media' unless you were a total bookwork, you kinda had to leave the house.
There were also the Knights of Columbus, Elks, Kiwanis, Junior League, the Scouts, 4-H, Hadassah, and more. It's amazing how many orgs there were!
I think the other commenters so far are right that not having to compete with TV and the internet helped tremendously. Nor with the current youth sports system. And I think the fact that they preceded the internet highway system, ubiquitous car ownership, and affordable air travel also helped. People just had a lot more time to fill without lots of easy alternatives.
Meanwhile, part of the reason I think we need new orgs (rather than trying to revitalize these groups, most of which still exist in some form) is that I think it can be hard to evolve groups to take into account new technological and social realities. The people that have kept most of these groups alive are older and love their traditions. They often don’t want things to change.
So I do think we need new orgs. But I also think we need societal changes to stress their importance and create more space for them. Here are three ideas for doing so I would love to see happen:
- National service: Trump is trying to kill AmeriCorps, but I would love to see the country move in the other direction and make it possible for every young person who is interested to spend 1-2 years in a service program. And while I wouldn’t make it mandatory, I would like to see a societal expectation created for it where people who didn’t serve would feel the need to explain why in the same way that folks who don’t go to college feel the need to do so.
- 4 day work week: Would love to see the 4 day work week become the norm but with the norm ALSO becoming that the 5th day be spent participating in some kind of civic or service org.
- Jury service changes: I love the idea of jury service (and have appreciated the experience of serving on a jury), but I’ve also found being called incredibly frustrating because of the clashes with other responsibilities in my life. But what if the system evolved so that literally every adult spent two weeks of a year in service (and would know years ahead of time when those two weeks would be), where the needed number of people would spend that time on juries but everyone else would be serving in other ways.
Seems like mere socializing works better if there’s at least some pretext, some other common goal or activity. Otherwise, it’s as awkward as a dating app.
Most of these organizations started as some form of mutual aid or charitable cause organization.
A weird result of the success of our social safety nets and our general over all prosperity is that the level of precarity to destitution that people face in our society is very low. Whereas when many of these organizations started in the late 19th and early 20th century that precarity was real even for people who were middle class and in intact families. A family was one terrible accident to the bread winning male head of household away from dire poverty. There, but for the Grace of God go I, was a lot easier to see, and so joining and building these societies was both a real good for your community and a form of insurance against your own catastrophe.
There is a similar irony to the success of the labor movement, working for decades to enshrine many safety and workplace protections into the legal system has led to a drop in the necessity of unions to bring those protections to individual employers.
Right, another example. I'm afraid it marks me as a rootless cosmopolitan that I don't even know what the Elks do, or the Moose for that matter, or what their raisons d'être may be. And yet there are probably living members of each species who would laugh at my ignorance.
Also, why do ungulates prevail? Or was there a Lions club as well? Yes; I think there was. And didn't someone collect used eye-glasses to send to the visually impaired?
One of my grandfathers was a naval officer in WWII and joined the Elks upon his return to civilian life because it was a good place to drink and play cards with other vets who'd had similar experiences. Pretty sure drinks were sold at cost too. From his perspective at least, the charitable stuff was a cover to make membership more palatable to my grandmother. Eventually he found a yacht club where a bunch of former Naval officers were doing the same thing, with the 'benefit' that their wives could join, though its unclear how happy he was about that.
My experience is that at least in the bay area, many of these clubs exist, are open to new members, and fun for the members but don't really do much advertising or attempt to get new members. A big alternative to these organizations in recent times are gyms and at least in my experience with bay area rock climbing gyms it's pretty easy to meet new people and make friends if you go regularly.
I am going to give Matt the benefit of the doubt that this isn't meant as a humble brag, but holy shit does it make me feel like garbage.
"a perfect pretext for hitting pause on reading Victorian novels and so I could read a couple of books about Proto-Indo-European, plus John McWhorter’s new book on pronouns, and also just spend less time reading because the Knicks were in the playoffs"
So relatable! Who hasn't signed up for an online class on a Brontë novel to get that bit of extra time you needed to read three linguistics books during the course of your basketball team's playoff run? We've all been there.
Yeah. I also have been humbled to learn that some people read A LOT.
It's had a good influence on me. I've actually been reading more since listening to The Ezra Klein Show. I saw this interview of him recently where he explains that he used to wish he could just import information into his brain with a data port, but he's come to understand that it's the actual process of reading that helps him think. He used an example of the fictional conductor Lydia Tar talking about preparing music. Since music is my specialty, that was sort of a lightbulb comment for me. It makes sense.
The "trick" for being "Lost in Thought" (as Hitz calls it) is to allow one's innate curiosity to rediscover what's personally interesting, because that's what provides the motivation. Returning to intellectual enthusiasms from high school and college is one way to do it. But the main thing is not to dismiss any quirky interests that might be lurking in one's secret dreams. There are books about everything these days. Every book has ideas that lead to other ideas. Even well written thrillers, read with Wikipedia handy, can lead to new interests. Then there's travel: coming home can result in all sorts of questions about pretty much anything, including art, architecture, geology, transport, culture, food, whatever catches the fancy in a strange place.
The intersection between one's own mind and other minds via books and conversation is limitless. But never let anyone make fun of you or raise their eyebrows because you're keen on something. (And it's okay to put a book aside unread and pick up another...)
Matt! The most important thing about Ender's Game is that none of the people involved actually saved the world, they just ended a different and unrelated world.
> And I’m not going to suggest that everyone should follow my path here, but it does occur to me
> that a general reluctance to try new things is almost certainly not all that rare.
I think about this a lot. Children have a LOT of practice being bad at things, because the entire experience of childhood is one of bumping up against the limits of things you can't quite do yet but will be expected to do regularly in one or ten years. (Tying shoes, alphabetizing things, visually identifying animals, multiplying numbers, walking, speaking...)
And adults end up with less and less practice at this as time goes on. Early in your career, you learn new things because they are the specialized skills that _other_ adults don't need to have - but after a few years, you've picked most of those up.
And so we get more and more easily frustrated, because we are more and more out-of-practice with sucking at something.
I've got a few practices in my own life to try to push back against that - I try to pick up something new at least once a year (unicycling, cooking, knitting, riding a motorcycle, learning Japanese) even if I don't stick with it, just because it's a nice reminder of what it's like to suck at something (to start with) and gain skill with it as I practice.
OK, you have inspired me to finish knitting a pair of socks that are looking pretty sorry right now. I am also attempting to learn Spanish, and have sort of given up because mainly my latent French, which I used to be close to fluent in, keeps coming back instead. I am also awful at parallel parking and haven't practiced because it is so embarrassing when people see that someone as old as I am can't park. (especially in our new vehicle, a stupid SUV because no one makes station wagons anymore.) You are on to something about not being as used to being frustrated. But I also get tired more easily now!
Glad to hear that you're feeling inspired! Pushing through the tough parts is often the thing that brings that pang of "ugh, I hate this" acutely. (And sadly, as adults, we often have less time to just re-try the thing. If you set aside an hour for working on a project, and at the end of the hour you realize that you've screwed things up such that you actually need to undo a bunch of your work - that sucks!)
In terms of parking - there was a point a year or so into the pandemic when I realized that I was probably losing my practice at navigating tight garages, and I started going out once a week to practice. I had a mental map of garages with tight corners and awkwardly-placed pillars (and that had free entry/exit), and I'd rotate between them, going to one and pulling into and out of a space on each floor of the garage.
Obviously I can't compare this to the version of my life where I didn't do that, but I haven't scraped a fender in a parking garage since like 2018, so it _may have_ worked!
I have something for every stage of tiredness throughout the day. (Retired, so none of it is actually work.) Theoretically the French will eventually recede while continuing to speed up the Spanish vocabulary. I think the brain finally picks up the trick of compartmentalizing languages. (The Europeans have this down pat.)
This is so interesting! I used to do a similar thing, but I realized it was having the contrary effect for me. I have found in many domains that, usually after a small hump, there's pretty rapid beginner skill gain which is like a giant reliable dopamine hit -- right up until it's not. But then you're at the point where you really have to put in the time and careful practice and have a coach to improve (and so on) -- and there's only so many such things you can be working on in addition to, you know, normal adulting.
I'm very curious how many of the new things you do stick with, and if you ever cycle some out (or back in), or if it really is just the practice of "sucking at something" that you are working on.
I think cycling in and out of stuff works. They say you learn to ski in the summer. When I joined a Spanish class this week a year after spending nine days in Mexico City trying to communicate with a small staff at my hotel who had no English whatsoever, I felt like a bit more Spanish was finally at my fingertips.
MY: "This was really the original promise of the internet: helping people transcend the limits of physical space to form connections with other people around ideas and interests. It has, I think, mostly not worked out that way..."
I would say that it has worked out *exactly* that way. It's just that it's not made us as happy as we thought it would. People are able to find a lot of choice online in terms of what they like to do; they can read parenting blogs, novels, watch funny shorts, debate each other on Twitter and dunk on people whose takes they don't agree with, what have you. What's true is that they don't seem to be that happy about it.
I also think that the comparison to the factory system of the 18th century is not the right one. Industrial capitalism was a matter of investment and labor and it was no wonder that early factories were terrible places to work at (before they became better which is why, as you say, it all worked out). But the internet and online communities did not emerge in a commercial context. The early online communities (including ARPANET, the most influential of them all) emerged in a academic/leisure context. People loved arguing with each other and finding other people with the same interests who were physically far away. But there were very little stakes; only a tiny percentage of humanity was online and most activities with high stakes (political advertising, buying/selling stuff, the fate of companies) happened elsewhere.
It was logical then that a myth grew around the internet that it could be the basis of bringing people together. And that myth was largely correct. The internet does help you find things that interest you. It's just that when everyone is on the internet and high-stakes activities all happen through the internet, the original meaning of "find people and things you like" has shifted and it doesn't seem to make people as happy as it used to. And that's okay. But it does mean, as you say, that we can't really pin all our hopes on the internet. So I do agree with you after all.
Had to do it: https://xkcd.com/635/
"Dear Peter Wiggin: This is to inform you that you have received enough upvotes on your Reddit comment to become president of the world. Please be at the UN tomorrow at 8:00 AM sharp."
I think we all sort of believe, deep down, that this is possible.
The endorphin rush I get for being validated (or hated) by a complete stranger is as perplexing as it is undeniable.
"...as perplexing as it is undeniable...."
Now imagine performing live under the big top. Being a clown on a political blog is just methadone compared to the pure heroin of genuine clowning in a genuine circus tent. Filled with complete strangers, yes, but still such a goddamn rush.
I can only imagine. But I think it's a bit less perplexing when you're physically surrounded by adoration.
A leader chosen by popular acclaim on social media?
Is their name Leadey McLeadface?
I truly believe that if I write a comment that is liked at least 250 times on Slow Boring, I'll *at least* get a call tomorrow from Kathleen Kingsbury.
"...Kathleen Kingsbury...."
Huh. Had to look her up. Opinion editor at the NYT.
I'd say that her record of finding interesting and intelligent perspectives on politics is...not so good, to judge by their suite of writers. I know, she's new, and probably inherited some of the old names. But I simply would not have taken the job unless given carte blanche to fire Maureen Dowd, Tom Friedman, David Brooks, and a bunch of the other deadwood.
This comment is Mustache of Understanding erasure.
"... Mustache of Understanding erasure...."
To which the natural reply is, "Suck. On. This."
Not that I personally would make that reply, because I find it offensive and undignified.
Well, I did say "at least."
Also, turns out Paul Krugman agrees with you! https://www.imightbewrong.org/p/im-thrilled-to-be-on-substack-so?r=i2ydk&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Friedman and David Brooks are both as insightful as anyone, as is Ezra. Douthat and David French are both first rate and interesting. MacWhorter is great. Kristof has his moments. And while I haven't read that many of her Times columns (and haven't really loved the ones I did), I was a huge fan of Zeynep's Substack.
Losing Krugman was a blow. I think there is a good argument to be made that he's been far and away the most valuable opinion columnist of the 21st century; the combination of his economics knowledge, the clarity of verve of his writing, and his ability to write quickly is unmatched. That said, while I'm a definite fan of his Substack, it's been interesting to me that its quality has not been quite as high as his Times writing. My sense is that he did benefit from editors challenging him.
I absolutely agree, and worse is the quality of commenters on Krugman’s substack. Very much a left partisan echo chamber.
Heh. I haven’t spent any time in the comments there. But it sounds like the opposite of the Free Press, where there are lots of interesting pieces (admittedly amid some dreck as well) but with commenters that are mindlessly knee jerk folks from the right.
Charles Blow. Or did he leave already?
I should be President of the World. I would be a good President and do hardly any crimes.
"...do hardly any crimes...."
What, never?
Hardly ever!
"Hardly ever!"
He hardly ever does the crimes!
So, give three cheers and one cheer more....
I was going to write:
We give three cheers and one with mirth
For the noble President of the Earth!
We give three cheers and one with mirth forrrrrrrr
The President of the Earth!
(I love a Gilbert & Sullivan reference. I am presently working on my magnum opus, "I Am The Very Model of a Modern Gay Millennial.")
"I Am The Very Model of a Modern Gay Millennial."
Wait: a gay man who likes G&S operettas? Un-possible.
That’s great. When I was in grad school, the math department had a student talk series called “Many Cheerful Fact”, though most of them were not about the square of the hypotenuse (and didn’t even contain news about binomial theorem).
I often think it's comical, fal la la, &c, that every boy and every gal that's born into this world alive is either a little liberal or else a little conservative.
Heavens! You are an intellectual chap!
Yes, but would you do very good posts?
If only.
I know, right?
A while ago, maybe even in your later Vox days, you wrote about how regaining an internal locus of control goes a long way towards grounding good mental health, and honestly it's some of the best info/advice I've read and it's really stuck with me.
"Trying something else" really reinforces internal control because it shows that you really can just do things. Doomscrolling does the opposite because it fixes your attention on things far behind your control, and if all you do is fixate on things beyond your control, your entire life is going to start feeling out of control, and your mental health will be impacted.
For me, the last two years I've started regularly exercising (lifting, then running), meditating, and drinking less. Lo and behold I feel much, much better about things.
Also I hear you're on deck for the CHH podcast. Glad to see you doing your part to elevate the Joe Rogan of the Left.
Drinking less is a lot more effective than I want it to be.
"Try something else" is underrated in a lot of areas. Parenting is another one where you can see people try the same approach over and over despite constant failure and seemingly unable to imagine there might be alternatives to try.
I think there is something pretty hardwired in our human psyche for that. Consider that we used to live in smallish tribes where nothing ever changed so no one ever had to do anything differently.
Just successfully got my daughter to go to sleep without putting up a fight every night recently by trying something else. 10/10 would recommend for parenting.
What did you try that ended up working?
(She’s freshly 4, for reference)
We got ready for bed ourselves and were kind of performatively tired, but let her pick when she went to bed. We were only going to keep it up if she picked reasonable times, but in a few days she’d immediately say she was ready for bed once I started getting ready for bed.
You read Hunt, Gather, Parent?
It is in fact exactly where we got the idea!
Alternatively, you can just quit Twitter. Loads of people criticize Bluesky for being too quiet or too liberal, but honestly I kind of like that it's quiet. The discourse on X is actively hostile.
People say that but your follow list is under your control.
I was skeptical initially, but I eventually gave up all social media (aside from occasional comment sections of newsletters) and feel like it did me a world of good. I thought maybe just going to Bluesky exclusively would be enough, but cutting ALL of it out has really made a difference.
What's the CHH podcast?
I'm guessing "Cartoons Hate Her".
Dang I was hoping for some kind of Calvin & Hobbes Hour, dedicated to methodically going through each strip of the entire run...
She’s gonna have to show her face if she wants to podcast.
It’s confusing to me why anybody wants to *watch* a *podcast*. I think the whole point is that it’s something you do while cleaning, driving, or exercising! But it does seem like the big ones are on video now.
“Relatedly, the longer that I cover politics the more I have the sense that a lot of people are asking the political system to accomplish things for them that are really outside the scope of public policy.”
This has been my sense of things for a decade now.
A lot of things have come within the scope of public policy in the last century or two that were clearly outside of it before. Things like access to medical treatment and education, product safety, and environmental quality. I suspect this has subconsciously led people to demand further increases in scope of public policy, even beyond its abilities.
(Most of these expanded capacities of public policy are related to changes in technology and social organization. I can’t tell if any such changes have taken some things out of the domain of public policy that used to be there, but there may well be some.)
How many of our problems in America are because the Constitution is both a) groundbreaking for its time and b) a quarter-millennium-old document that simply doesn’t consider the expectations that 21st-century Westerners place upon their governments?
1. Medical treatment has been the subject of public policy since ancient times, mostly through public health as there was not much medical knowledge per se.
2. Same thing for education, honestly.
3. Same thing for product quality. We have regulations on food going back to the ancient world, for example.
4. Same thing for environmental quality. We have regulations on emissions, noxious odors, dumping waste, and so on going back to the ancient world.
What I see is that people want the government to do things like enforce their perceived status when it can’t. I know it can’t because… say it with me… we have regulations on this going back to the ancient world.
They have never done anything like work. Ever. Period.
These things are outside the scope of public policy not because public policy can’t contemplate them but because we’ve learned that public policy isn’t really able to achieve those ends.
1. Medical insurance didn't exist before about a century and a half ago, and now it is the primary form of public policy interventions in medical treatment. Maybe some other public policy interventions existed that technically fall under "medical treatment", but there has been a drastic transformation in the past century or two.
2. Publicly funded K-12 education, and university education, didn't exist two centuries ago, and they are now the primary form of public policy interventions in medical treatment. Maybe some other public policy interventions existed that technical fall under "education", but there has been a drastic transformation in the past two centuries.
3. Maybe there was public regulation of food quality, but if so, it applied only to the small minority of food that was consumed by people other than the ones who produced it. And I am not aware of any regulation as detailed and significant as, say, car safety regulation, or lead paint regulation, before the early 20th century.
4. Again, a few such regulations may have existed in some times and places - but they were nowhere near as significant as modern ones, and they weren't targets for public demands of regulation for most of history. Even in the early 20th century, in the few liberal democracies that existed, there was very little regulation of air, noise, or light pollution, or public conception that this was something that could be demanded.
Also, citation needed on the claim that no regulations of social status have ever worked. These regulations have taken very different forms in very different societies, raging from prohibitions on the presence of women in public, to rules about who can wear what clothing, to support of the arts.
Health insurance started with hospital plans in the 1930s and was preceded by mutual aid societies, which fulfilled a similar function but without the financial structure. Health insurance, as opposed to medicine generally, only entered public policy in the relatively recent past because it's a specific technical innovation within the financial world driven by the collection of health data thereby enabling an actuarial accounting of morbidity.
Publicly-funded K-12 didn't exist two centuries ago because the K-12 concept itself didn't exist two centuries ago. We have always had publicly funded education, though, going all the way back to government creating scribal and religious schools.
Food quality regulation was mostly about things the vast majority of people consumed. It was considered less in terms of public health than in terms of the producer's immorality.
I dismiss out of hand that our ability to figure out what we need to regulate how using the technical tools available to us represents a change in kind. It's still driven by the same concerns over sickness, ritual cleanliness, and so on.
You clearly know about sumptuary laws, so I suggest you look into them further. They all end the same way: nearly universal non-compliance or fashion shifting to things not covered by them as wealth-but-not-noble people adopt them. You can also look up fashion and fashion-policing in the Soviet Union. You can also look into the history of the hijab.
This is my last reply to you anyway. I don't like people saying "citation needed", it presumes we're all still in undergrad having freshly learned what we're talking about. It's a scourge upon discourse.
It's a sin for which I have never and will never forgive Randall Munroe.
Stole my dek!
Edit: oh shit that’s me. My “do something different” is going to be changing my Twitter password, writing it down, then throwing away the slip of paper sometime next week after we release the NYC poll we’re running. Just say no to Hitler.com!
Sleep in some mornings man
“I get up, dust my clothes off, sleep is the cousin of death / no time to doze off” —J. Cole
“…sleep is the cousin of death….”
I’ll grant you that, but if you want to meet the kid brother of death, try chronic sleep deprivation. You’ll be glad to see his cousin after that.
Nothing like a Nas homage
I guess that I'm obligated to quote a Housman poem.
Up, lad: thews that lie and cumber
Sunlit pallets never thrive;
Morns abed and daylight slumber
Were not meant for man alive.
Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover;
Breath’s a ware that will not keep.
Up, lad: when the journey’s over
There’ll be time enough to sleep.
https://poets.org/poem/shropsire-lad-iv
A Cole lyric in a slow boring comment section is something I never thought I needed.
I'm impressed a man of your generation made a Half Baked reference.
Idk what that is tbh
Okay, *now* I feel old.
Milan refuses to acknowledge the accuracy of the ground-breaking documentary about the Ivy League, How High, starring Method Man and Red Man.
Ivy League secrets they don't want you to know: "I study high. Take the test high. Get high scores!"
It's a stoner comedy from 1998 starring Dave Chappelle. (I've never seen it, but the TV ads were everywhere when it came out.)
I enjoyed this piece (and ironically enough am here to comment this early specifically because I got up to slog my way through a book club selection -- Michelle Huneven's "Jamesland"), but from a copy editing standpoint I would suggest italicizing book titles or at least putting them in quotation marks.
I say that because this statement:
But several of the Victorian novels that I’ve read that do have such themes, like Shirley and Eliot’s Felix Holt . . .
made me think Shirley was a co-author of "Felix Holt" and I spent the rest of the piece wondering who Shirley was until I got to the second endnote and learned that it is a Charlotte Bronte novel.
Yes, I go to a second Catholic Church and talk to all the old folks there and engage them where they are at. I guarantee you talk to an old person you've never met and both your days will be improved 100%.
I'll honestly and earnestly politely chat with any stranger I meet and have an enjoyable interaction.
I'll be going back to grad school in the fall for a counseling degree (can't believe it's costing $60k!); lots of annoying young people to engage with. What a challenge!
Folks who aren't sharing or aren't willing share good values I offer to them for free (love, earnestness, joy, contentment, kindness, grace, charity), I shake the dust off my proverbial sandals and go find a new stranger to share these values with. I try to be lavish.
“… go to a second Catholic Church….”
Just curious — what’s the significance of “second”? Is “second Catholic” a sect of Catholicism? Or do you go to your own church first and then to another one as well? Not enough old folks in the first?
Just like anything else, heavy users of Catholicism sometimes need to up their dosage to stay level. And since Vatican 2, the amount of Catholicism in a single service is simply not enough to meet the needs of those who are most profoundly effected.
"...heavy users of Catholicism...."
Factually inaccurate, personally insensitive, irrelevant to the topic, and a disservice to the discourse.
A+ work, my child. Let me be the first to congratulate you.
You'd think Vatican 2 would have doubled the per-Mass dose all by itself!
"...You'd think Vatican 2...."
No, you're confusing it with Vatican Part Deux, the re-Vaticaning.
2 Vatican 2 Council
My IRL habit that I picked up was an assist from my uncle, who had the wisdom to get some friends together every Friday morning and go shoot the shit at a coffeehouse. He had always urged me to come join, but I really didn't get the wisdom behind it in my youth until later. It's a nice way to get some talk in on everyday happenings going on in the community and the world. About the closest thing this atheist can get to church.
It is notable that I (along with Matt and I presume most Slow Borers) are odd in that the internet *has* been a help in transcending the limits of physical space to form connections with other people around ideas and interests. There have been several other online communities I've been a part of that's been all about gathering around common interests, and I've made lots of good friends through that, plenty that I've met IRL along the way. Sure, there's been the inevitable toxicity along the way, but many years of experience have taught me how to avoid that.
And on that note, it was funny talking about this with a longtime online friend last month, because we both felt that people hadn't learned lessons that we learned a long time ago about how to navigate the internet. We agreed that that's why we both found Zuckerberg properties to just be terrible. My Twitter usage has also been unusual: never tweet, only calibrate it to read actually useful information. I've always instead gravitated to forums like this one, perhaps why most of us have found ourselves here anyway.
Slow Boring comment section is a great example of where the internet can be beneficial to exchange ideas and connect respectfully.
You're just paid to say that!
I've argued politics and policy on a lot of other places in the past, and I mostly enjoyed it, and the discourse was way better than the typical Facebook post, but it still hasn't been as good as here.
SlateStarCodex/AstralCodexTen are one of those places for me. In recent comment sections there, I’ve seen a lot of self congratulation about how good the discourse is there, and I’m constantly thinking how much worse it is than here. But it truly is better than many other places.
It makes me wonder how to get it even better than it currently is here.
SB has an outstanding comment section. Here are two problems I see:
-whenever we start talking about gender dynamics, parenthood, how should Democrats win over men, etc. things can get... weird (I'm sure doubly so because there are relatively few women commenters)
-new and unimproved since November 2024: the is/ought distinction that breaks commenters into two camps, the "sh*t is effed up, why don't more people care" camp and the "welp they don't care and you can't make them, so focus on winning hearts and minds rather than holier-than-thou-moralizing" camp. People from the two camps start talking past each other and it leads to unproductive shouting (see also the related "we gotta move to the center" vs. "if we're just gonna be Republicans Lite Minus The Fascism, why bother even being Democrats")
Not sure how to solve either problem other than more active moderation?
I'm sure it's good for the very high level thinker, it's just less comprehensible for someone like me who's not on that very top tier.
“I’m sure it’s good for the very high level thinker…”
IFF said thinker is cool with casual racism and bad-faith lib-baiting. Honestly, skip the ACX comment section for your mental health, you’re welcome.
It’s like Georgists and the Land Value Tax, or Abundance bros and housing, but if they were arguing for an idea with the intellectual firepower of tariffs and rent control.
My mental capacity for that section isn't enough anyway to participate, so problem solved anyway!
I host the apparently sought-after these days weekly dinner party with friends, and have kept it going for over a decade. It’s such a pleasant and grounding tradition.
I got de-boosted for not getting verified (I was never particularly popular on Twitter, but I would regularly get several hundred likes for a good reply, and now it’s rare for me to get one).
Ironically, it’s made my Twitter experience much better. I no longer get an adrenaline rush from seeing a tweet take off. I don’t get into arguments because I don’t have the thrill of an audience. I mostly read the feeds of the handful of people I really like, and maybe retweet an article I find interesting. Then I get bored and log off.
Burning question I have about the swim practice reading: do you leave your phone in the car or something, or do you just have the discipline to stay with the book instead of breaking to scroll?
I constantly read books on...my phone! I love that I can start reading whatever book anywhere at any time and personally, I don't have any problem with getting distracted from it. Actually, the problem is the opposite. Sometimes, I'll start reading on my phone and then look up and realize I've been sitting in my vehicle in the parking lot for 2 hours reading a book.
Wondered the same. I could imagine stands full of parents, each staring at his/her phone.
I guess I'm weird, but I've always found "scrolling" to be so mind-numbingly boring that I would never have to worry about leaving my phone behind for the temptation. I don't wait around at swim practices myself, but for my daughters' swim meets I just watch the whole thing because its usually interesting enough on its own (other than the diving, which is pretty dull imo). I would probably bring a book and read it in some circumstances, but I'd also feel like an awful nerd for doing that, and would likely get called out by my daughters to top it off.
This post really hit me in the feels today. Just a really solid post, and I think it also hits on people's desire to be happy even if some of us are deeply unhappy on the inside and how they are processing those feelings in a negative way via a political process that destroys and doesn't build.
One of my favorite quotes is from Rebecca Solnit and is;
"To be hopeful means to be uncertain about the future, to be tender toward possibilities, to be dedicated to change all the way down to the bottom of your heart."
Change has to come from inside us first, before we just yell at society to change on Facebook, Twitter or vote for candidates who generally are terrible or support tearing things down instead of making them better for all of us. We have to get some sense of collective back if we want to survive.
Solnit?
Oh man, I think I wrote this on my phone. Thanks for catching, I just edited lol.
Matt writes: “ I think the basic issues that I’m wrestling with on this journey — digital media brain rot, post-pandemic disruptions to our habits, male friendship, parenting — are probably things that a lot of people are dealing with.”
Golf! Almost anyone can become proficient enough to play in 4 hours or less; the handicap system allows all levels to compete; there is sufficient (but not too much) time to converse; beer is allowed during play. It is the perfect pastime for guys and gals alike. To be fair, it is tougher for those who prefer city living over the suburbs.
This is intended more as anecdote than "you are wrong":
I lived in SE Asia for a decade and the golf experience there is dramatically different from what Americans/Australians/etc think of as golf.
First off, land is scarce so course fees are exorbitant. This is compounded by the low wages so only rich people (i.e. price insensitive) golf, which probably drives up fees even more.
It is scorching hot and humid so if you want to play 18 holes you need to wake up at 3am to drive an hour to the course outside the city for your 4am teetime to be done before the heat really sets in.
It is a stereotype that Asians bet on everything but... There will be betting on golf. And since only the rich play the entry level is usually a few hundred dollars over a round.
Everyone sand bags. Everyone. Because hierarchy and saving face is a stereotype in Asian culture but it isn't wrong. If you're playing with a potential customer, you need to lose. It's called "customer golf".
And 80% of the women who golf are someone's mistress or former model trophy wife (see above: only the rich can afford to golf), so "regular" women are definitely hesitant to join in. Plus highly likely to be the only woman in a fairly sexist foursome on the course.
Growing up in the rustbelt midwest, my experience was the obverse of yours. Everyone played golf, public courses were everywhere, it was low-key competitive. I was not great at it (to say the least) but it was fun. Playing badly with more-competitive adults was less fun, so I haven’t played in years, but I think John’s point is a good one.
That's interesting! I definitely never felt like golf was a thing I might do to meet people and have fun. The income it takes to participate definitely excludes me, but I'm not longing for it much in the first place. I don't think I have much in common with most golfers.
I've met most of my real life friends at the dog park or in my apartment building.
We moved during lockdown and I have no idea how we'd have made friends with any of the neighbours if most of us hadn't had dogs.
I was taught to golf by an uncle who told me it was important for every young person to be just barely worse at golf than their boss. 'Customer golf' manages both up and out.
“… dramatically different from….”
Wow. Thanks for the report.
Wow! I appreciate the report about something I had never thought about.
Not a pastime but for connections, my church choir is great. They do help me remember what people who don't pay a lot of attention to politics are like and to imagine how normal people would be affected by my "everything must change so that everything may remain the same" ideas.
I just picked up golf this spring! Talk about "trying something new"--it is deliciously humiliating. I've always veered toward activities I show a natural proficiency at, so learning how to golf has been humbling in the best way, really breaking me out of my mold.
Point of clarification! Are you saying anyone can become reasonably good at golf in four hours? That…has not been my experience haha.
My mastery of the English language improves a bit after my second cup of coffee. My original comment was composed prior to completing my first, I'm afraid.
I meant that even a bad golfer or beginner can make their way around the course in 4 hours or less. Definitely not that one can become proficient in 4 hours. Proficiency takes at least 4x10¹² hours.
I recently walked a course for the first time in twenty years with some coworkers who are actual golfers. I warned them in advance I couldn’t really play, mostly hit the 7 iron, and picked up my ball frequently to advance play (just dropping near them when they got to short game). It was actually really fun, but most people might not have my tolerance for being so publicly awful haha.
Yea I grew up outside Palm Springs with state champions and spent much more than 4 hours golfing and am still embarrassingly bad to the point that I basically can’t golf with anyone remotely serious.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yoH5G2SQbg
"To be fair, it is tougher for those who prefer city living over the suburbs."
Not in San Francisco, which somehow has 5 golf courses within our 49 square miles.
Wow really? I used to live there. The only one I can think of is the one at Lands End.
They should make 4 of them into housing areas...
The George Carlin joke about converting golf courses to housing for the homeless would hit particularly hard there...
Central Los Angeles has an unnecessarily large number of golf courses - one of which will even be next to the Century City subway stop.
Trying to figure out the right age to introduce my daughter (currently 4). I’ve hit a many a bucket of balls with my dad in my youth, it’s an absolute blast.
My sister introduced it to her daughter (age 2.5) recently with some plastic clubs, and they're both enjoying the results!
People have far more control over how they live their life, and far less control over how other people live their lives, than they realize.
I've found Oren Cass worth reading because I think his point about trade's role in the decline of factory jobs and the blow that inflicted on American society is valid. At the same time, I think Noah Smith's response (https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-anti-economists-have-overreached/comment/121733490), that regardless of trade, those jobs were going away eventually is real. And AI is almost certainly going to accelerate this process for everyone.
Which is a long prelude to saying that I think that the need for people to find meaning and relationships outside of work is only going to become more and more important. And I fully agree with Matt's point that people need to find it outside the realm of social media of well.
Where I think this piece goes a little off track is the belief that people will find these things by leveraging the power of the internet to find their people and their niche. Instead, in a world where most people aren't religious (and therefore are unable to take advantages of the collective meaning making opportunities that good churches and other religious institutions offer), I'd suggest we need a new set of civic institutions and membership organizations that can offer opportunities for people to work together to do meaningful things.
Been reading Robert Putnam's The Upswing which talks about how American society was revitalized in the first half of the 20th century through the creation of orgs like Rotary, Lions, PTAs, unions, that offered these outlets. Think what modern society needs are both a new or revitalized set of these types of collective orgs but also some societal changes that make participating in them both easier and more expected. Participating in meaningful stuff has lots of moments of friction whereas TV and the internet always offers a frictionless way to spend your time that is fun and engaging. But these are ultimately empty calories. Choosing the ultimately more rewarding path is partly about self-discipline, but it's also about making the more meaningful choices easier to find and engage in as well as society sending the message that it's important.
“… orgs like Rotary, Lions, ….”
Yeah, I’m curious about how and why those organizations worked. I’d add Masons, Odd Fellows, and Shriners, as well. Some of them worked pretty well, too. So, what combination of factors did the trick? How much was it mere socializing, how much was it tied into your professional advancement, how much was it oriented toward the ostensible purpose ( eg kids hospitals for Shriners).
I suspect these were all somewhat conservative in membership, de facto, but also kept explicit politics at arms length: they were not political action groups. And perhaps that helped them provide other kinds of community?
“What combination of factors did the trick?”
Honestly (and sadly), probably the fact that back in the 1950s they didn’t have to compete with social media, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ or video games?
(ETA: or online pr0n)
When my husband and I were at the No Kings rally on Saturday (ours was one of those where everyone was lined up along a major thoroughfare), he noticed that older folks seemed a lot more open to chatting with strangers than younger people. I’m afraid social media is having this effect, making people afraid to open their doors or answer phone calls (of course the latter being a rational response to the proliferation of spam calling).
I'd say rapid industrialization and urbanization brought a bunch of people together into cities in the second half of the 19th century, then the progressive movement (the original one) gave them a lot more free time in the first half of the 20th, and since there was very little in the way of 'mass media' unless you were a total bookwork, you kinda had to leave the house.
There were also the Knights of Columbus, Elks, Kiwanis, Junior League, the Scouts, 4-H, Hadassah, and more. It's amazing how many orgs there were!
I think the other commenters so far are right that not having to compete with TV and the internet helped tremendously. Nor with the current youth sports system. And I think the fact that they preceded the internet highway system, ubiquitous car ownership, and affordable air travel also helped. People just had a lot more time to fill without lots of easy alternatives.
Meanwhile, part of the reason I think we need new orgs (rather than trying to revitalize these groups, most of which still exist in some form) is that I think it can be hard to evolve groups to take into account new technological and social realities. The people that have kept most of these groups alive are older and love their traditions. They often don’t want things to change.
So I do think we need new orgs. But I also think we need societal changes to stress their importance and create more space for them. Here are three ideas for doing so I would love to see happen:
- National service: Trump is trying to kill AmeriCorps, but I would love to see the country move in the other direction and make it possible for every young person who is interested to spend 1-2 years in a service program. And while I wouldn’t make it mandatory, I would like to see a societal expectation created for it where people who didn’t serve would feel the need to explain why in the same way that folks who don’t go to college feel the need to do so.
- 4 day work week: Would love to see the 4 day work week become the norm but with the norm ALSO becoming that the 5th day be spent participating in some kind of civic or service org.
- Jury service changes: I love the idea of jury service (and have appreciated the experience of serving on a jury), but I’ve also found being called incredibly frustrating because of the clashes with other responsibilities in my life. But what if the system evolved so that literally every adult spent two weeks of a year in service (and would know years ahead of time when those two weeks would be), where the needed number of people would spend that time on juries but everyone else would be serving in other ways.
My suspicion is that merely socializing is the least stringent* form of a club.
*edit: I don’t even know what work** I meant hear**, but I don’t think it was this. It’s pre-6 over on this coast, apologies.
Edit 2: what am I even doing here, good lord.
Seems like mere socializing works better if there’s at least some pretext, some other common goal or activity. Otherwise, it’s as awkward as a dating app.
Yes, exactly. You need that *something* there to hold it/you all together. At least until you’re genuinely friends, perhaps.
“… don’t even know what work I meant hear….”
You probably just meant “strychnine “. I get that confused with “stringent” all the time.
Most of these organizations started as some form of mutual aid or charitable cause organization.
A weird result of the success of our social safety nets and our general over all prosperity is that the level of precarity to destitution that people face in our society is very low. Whereas when many of these organizations started in the late 19th and early 20th century that precarity was real even for people who were middle class and in intact families. A family was one terrible accident to the bread winning male head of household away from dire poverty. There, but for the Grace of God go I, was a lot easier to see, and so joining and building these societies was both a real good for your community and a form of insurance against your own catastrophe.
There is a similar irony to the success of the labor movement, working for decades to enshrine many safety and workplace protections into the legal system has led to a drop in the necessity of unions to bring those protections to individual employers.
The Benevolent and Protective Order of the Elks!
"...the Elks!"
Right, another example. I'm afraid it marks me as a rootless cosmopolitan that I don't even know what the Elks do, or the Moose for that matter, or what their raisons d'être may be. And yet there are probably living members of each species who would laugh at my ignorance.
Also, why do ungulates prevail? Or was there a Lions club as well? Yes; I think there was. And didn't someone collect used eye-glasses to send to the visually impaired?
One of my grandfathers was a naval officer in WWII and joined the Elks upon his return to civilian life because it was a good place to drink and play cards with other vets who'd had similar experiences. Pretty sure drinks were sold at cost too. From his perspective at least, the charitable stuff was a cover to make membership more palatable to my grandmother. Eventually he found a yacht club where a bunch of former Naval officers were doing the same thing, with the 'benefit' that their wives could join, though its unclear how happy he was about that.
There's a brand new Lions Club eyeglass collection box outside a church near my office!
"...a brand new Lions Club...."
Thank god that someone is still working to suppress the emergence of free markets in eyewear across the third world!
(Read that one in my best Neoliberal Shill voice.)
My experience is that at least in the bay area, many of these clubs exist, are open to new members, and fun for the members but don't really do much advertising or attempt to get new members. A big alternative to these organizations in recent times are gyms and at least in my experience with bay area rock climbing gyms it's pretty easy to meet new people and make friends if you go regularly.
"...rock climbing gyms it's pretty easy to meet ...."
The Bay Area is known for its social climbers.
That was genuinely funny
[Cary-Grant-pointing-and-saying-Get-Out.GIF]
I am going to give Matt the benefit of the doubt that this isn't meant as a humble brag, but holy shit does it make me feel like garbage.
"a perfect pretext for hitting pause on reading Victorian novels and so I could read a couple of books about Proto-Indo-European, plus John McWhorter’s new book on pronouns, and also just spend less time reading because the Knicks were in the playoffs"
So relatable! Who hasn't signed up for an online class on a Brontë novel to get that bit of extra time you needed to read three linguistics books during the course of your basketball team's playoff run? We've all been there.
Yeah. I also have been humbled to learn that some people read A LOT.
It's had a good influence on me. I've actually been reading more since listening to The Ezra Klein Show. I saw this interview of him recently where he explains that he used to wish he could just import information into his brain with a data port, but he's come to understand that it's the actual process of reading that helps him think. He used an example of the fictional conductor Lydia Tar talking about preparing music. Since music is my specialty, that was sort of a lightbulb comment for me. It makes sense.
https://youtu.be/smb7hy6KufQ?si=PIkKSJNQVmJy0ijT
If you want to retain the last shred of your self-respect as a reader, the last thing you should do is ever visit Jason Furman's Goodreads page.
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4651295-jason-furman
Don't click on the link. Seriously.
Thanks for the warning!
Really do pick up The Horse, The Wheel and Language. But consume in small doses. It's a heavy sucker.
It’s good, IMO, to have a pile of books going at once, including a heavy sucker.
Sorry Wizards fans
Hey, they’ve won a title more recently than the Knicks.
Matt's probably one of those people who can't stand the feeling that they're wasting time, so even on their downtime they're actively learning.
The "trick" for being "Lost in Thought" (as Hitz calls it) is to allow one's innate curiosity to rediscover what's personally interesting, because that's what provides the motivation. Returning to intellectual enthusiasms from high school and college is one way to do it. But the main thing is not to dismiss any quirky interests that might be lurking in one's secret dreams. There are books about everything these days. Every book has ideas that lead to other ideas. Even well written thrillers, read with Wikipedia handy, can lead to new interests. Then there's travel: coming home can result in all sorts of questions about pretty much anything, including art, architecture, geology, transport, culture, food, whatever catches the fancy in a strange place.
The intersection between one's own mind and other minds via books and conversation is limitless. But never let anyone make fun of you or raise their eyebrows because you're keen on something. (And it's okay to put a book aside unread and pick up another...)
Matt! The most important thing about Ender's Game is that none of the people involved actually saved the world, they just ended a different and unrelated world.
> And I’m not going to suggest that everyone should follow my path here, but it does occur to me
> that a general reluctance to try new things is almost certainly not all that rare.
I think about this a lot. Children have a LOT of practice being bad at things, because the entire experience of childhood is one of bumping up against the limits of things you can't quite do yet but will be expected to do regularly in one or ten years. (Tying shoes, alphabetizing things, visually identifying animals, multiplying numbers, walking, speaking...)
And adults end up with less and less practice at this as time goes on. Early in your career, you learn new things because they are the specialized skills that _other_ adults don't need to have - but after a few years, you've picked most of those up.
And so we get more and more easily frustrated, because we are more and more out-of-practice with sucking at something.
I've got a few practices in my own life to try to push back against that - I try to pick up something new at least once a year (unicycling, cooking, knitting, riding a motorcycle, learning Japanese) even if I don't stick with it, just because it's a nice reminder of what it's like to suck at something (to start with) and gain skill with it as I practice.
OK, you have inspired me to finish knitting a pair of socks that are looking pretty sorry right now. I am also attempting to learn Spanish, and have sort of given up because mainly my latent French, which I used to be close to fluent in, keeps coming back instead. I am also awful at parallel parking and haven't practiced because it is so embarrassing when people see that someone as old as I am can't park. (especially in our new vehicle, a stupid SUV because no one makes station wagons anymore.) You are on to something about not being as used to being frustrated. But I also get tired more easily now!
Glad to hear that you're feeling inspired! Pushing through the tough parts is often the thing that brings that pang of "ugh, I hate this" acutely. (And sadly, as adults, we often have less time to just re-try the thing. If you set aside an hour for working on a project, and at the end of the hour you realize that you've screwed things up such that you actually need to undo a bunch of your work - that sucks!)
In terms of parking - there was a point a year or so into the pandemic when I realized that I was probably losing my practice at navigating tight garages, and I started going out once a week to practice. I had a mental map of garages with tight corners and awkwardly-placed pillars (and that had free entry/exit), and I'd rotate between them, going to one and pulling into and out of a space on each floor of the garage.
Obviously I can't compare this to the version of my life where I didn't do that, but I haven't scraped a fender in a parking garage since like 2018, so it _may have_ worked!
I have something for every stage of tiredness throughout the day. (Retired, so none of it is actually work.) Theoretically the French will eventually recede while continuing to speed up the Spanish vocabulary. I think the brain finally picks up the trick of compartmentalizing languages. (The Europeans have this down pat.)
This is so interesting! I used to do a similar thing, but I realized it was having the contrary effect for me. I have found in many domains that, usually after a small hump, there's pretty rapid beginner skill gain which is like a giant reliable dopamine hit -- right up until it's not. But then you're at the point where you really have to put in the time and careful practice and have a coach to improve (and so on) -- and there's only so many such things you can be working on in addition to, you know, normal adulting.
I'm very curious how many of the new things you do stick with, and if you ever cycle some out (or back in), or if it really is just the practice of "sucking at something" that you are working on.
I think cycling in and out of stuff works. They say you learn to ski in the summer. When I joined a Spanish class this week a year after spending nine days in Mexico City trying to communicate with a small staff at my hotel who had no English whatsoever, I felt like a bit more Spanish was finally at my fingertips.
MY: "This was really the original promise of the internet: helping people transcend the limits of physical space to form connections with other people around ideas and interests. It has, I think, mostly not worked out that way..."
I would say that it has worked out *exactly* that way. It's just that it's not made us as happy as we thought it would. People are able to find a lot of choice online in terms of what they like to do; they can read parenting blogs, novels, watch funny shorts, debate each other on Twitter and dunk on people whose takes they don't agree with, what have you. What's true is that they don't seem to be that happy about it.
I also think that the comparison to the factory system of the 18th century is not the right one. Industrial capitalism was a matter of investment and labor and it was no wonder that early factories were terrible places to work at (before they became better which is why, as you say, it all worked out). But the internet and online communities did not emerge in a commercial context. The early online communities (including ARPANET, the most influential of them all) emerged in a academic/leisure context. People loved arguing with each other and finding other people with the same interests who were physically far away. But there were very little stakes; only a tiny percentage of humanity was online and most activities with high stakes (political advertising, buying/selling stuff, the fate of companies) happened elsewhere.
It was logical then that a myth grew around the internet that it could be the basis of bringing people together. And that myth was largely correct. The internet does help you find things that interest you. It's just that when everyone is on the internet and high-stakes activities all happen through the internet, the original meaning of "find people and things you like" has shifted and it doesn't seem to make people as happy as it used to. And that's okay. But it does mean, as you say, that we can't really pin all our hopes on the internet. So I do agree with you after all.