NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month. I don't know its origins, and I don't know how it went viral, and I don't know how truly widespread it is -- but every year, usually in November. hundreds of thousands of aspiring writers across the globe sit themselves down and dedicate themselves to finishing a 50,000 word novel in the span of a month.

(That comes down to around 1,670 words a day -- difficult, but once you get momentum, completely achievable.)

I've done it for years. My first attempt was in 2015, falling far short at just 7000 words. In 2017 I went above and beyond, taking 61,500 words and finishing a story. In 2018, I also managed to succeed, hitting 50,100 words. In 2019 I hit 50,002 words exactly -- and most of the writing was not, strictly speaking, for the "novel" but rather reflections on it. I skipped 2020 again, but in 2021 I fell short at 32,000 words, spread across a number of different drafts. I took the same approach in 2022 and 2023, hitting about 50,000 words in both years, spread across the sum total of everything I'd written for creative purposes even if it wasn't directed towards a "novel".

So I would describe myself as a long-time veteran of NaNoWriMo. I'm proud of the work, and I'm proud of my ability, even if I've yet to traditionally publish any of it. But I bring it up not to brag -- but to show that I've been a long-time participant in NaNoWriMo.

Yet I'm done.

I won't be doing NaNoWriMo again this year -- at least as a commemorated event. There's a real chance I won't be doing it ever again.

Here's why.

1. The NaNoWriMo organization allowed pedophiles to be in close contact with minors

2. The NaNoWriMo organization endorsed generative AI writing tools and accused detractors of classism and ableism

3. I don’t think the habits I developed by doing NaNoWriMo are sustainable

4. My priorities have shifted

1: NaNoWriMo Allegedly Let Pedophiles Groom Minors

So, first, let me distinguish between NaNoWriMo the *action* -- writing 50,000 words in a month -- and NaNoWriMo the *organization* -- the group that facilitates the event, has a fancy website, organizes people and builds communities, and hawks products at anyone who manages to write 50,000 words.

There's nothing wrong with the action from a moral standpoint. The sinful inaction is that of the organization.

So:

NaNoWriMo has an internet forum, and it's run day-to-day by volunteer moderators.

NaNoWriMo also has a Young Writer's Program, which is a program to get young people -- specifically teenagers -- writing, and giving them a community.

The moderators were not screened by the central NaNoWriMo organization. They were given free reign. And so someone who ran an adult website became a moderator in charge of the Young Writer's Program, and specifically directed teenagers in the program to their adult website so they could become prey for pedophiles.

They were reported to the NaNoWriMo organization, which did nothing for a year, until the FBI got involved.

This is disgusting on a systemic and operational level. If you're going to brand yourself as an organization that helps kids, you can't turn around and do nothing when those same kids report a pedophile to you and give you evidence over the course of a year. There is no world in which the free labor of a pedophile outweighs either the wellbeing of the children you aim to nurture or the reputational damage you'll take once it becomes clear you were okay with being complicit.

I have no idea how explosive this was. I have no idea if the scandal has spread. But this is one of those things where I have no true loyalty to "NaNoWriMo". I am dedicated to the craft -- and being associated with an organization that's harbored pedophiles is both morally abhorrent and a distraction I just don't need.

Call me a snake, but in the future if I tell people "Yeah so I'm writing a novel for National Novel Writing Month" there's a non-zero chance they say "National Novel Writing Month? Weren't there pedophiles doing that?" If I say "Yeah so I'm writing a novel in a month," they'll ask me about my novel.

My sources/further reading:

The summary I drew from

The board response

Victim testimonials (graphic description)

Another summary

2: NaNoWriMo claimed Generative AI detraction was classist and ableist

The people running NaNoWriMo are out-of-touch.

NaNoWriMo posted a message (now replaced) on its Zendesk help page. This message said that to "categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology"

Classism. ... The financial ability to engage a human for feedback and review assumes a level of privilege that not all community members possess.

Ableism. Not all brains have same abilities and not all writers function at the same level of education or proficiency in the language in which they are writing.

(Archived link)

Do they have a point? Sure. There are gaps in resourcing and gaps in human ability. But the backlash was immediate. Four members of NaNoWriMo's writers board stepped down. Sci-fi/Fantasy writer Daniel Jose Older said, in a public letter to the NaNoWriMo board (not the writer's board, just the regular board) “Your heinous re-configuring of language used to fight actual injustices into a shield to cover your transparently business-based posturing is unforgivable.”

(And yes, NaNoWriMo did get a sponsorship from an AI-assisted writing tool company.)

Generative AI's been a hot topic in the past year. The ability to generate slop has basically replaced the need for shitty writers and artists. I'll admit I've used it for generating computer code, and half the time it's unusable for anything remotely complicated. The primary concern for people who put their writing online (like me) is that generative AI needs training data, and it might have scraped my works for its ever-growing need for training data -- but I'm not going to let that stop me from publishing stuff I don't care that much about. The worry -- and I think it's valid -- is that a Generative AI capable of creative works depends on stolen creative works. That's disregarding the use of power and water.

But claiming classism and ableism to defend AI is a pathetic stance. For one -- as others have said -- it's a mind-killing statement. Most people would prefer not to be perceived as classist or ableist so raising these as the defense is like a get-out-of-jail free card for a coward when you know your audience is left-leaning. But others have stated it's tantamount to claiming that the disabled and poor can't create on their own.

Obviously, the poor and differently-abled face challenges that the well-off do not in the realm of creative works. But presenting AI as the solution to these problems is insulting and ignorant of the material conditions, and using these divisions to justify the use of AI reeks of performative allyship.

Ultimately, the NaNoWriMo organization just isn't one that aligns with my values. So as much as I've benefited from meeting people through it, I just don't feel I'll gain anything from flying their banner anymore.

3. The habits you develop in NaNoWriMo are actually not that conducive to a long-term life as a creative

Those are actual reasons to reject NaNoWriMo the Organization. Here are my reasons to abandon NaNoWriMo as an event.

As I've stated, I've done NaNoWriMo on and off since 2015 -- almost a decade. Only now am I doing any real serious reflection on it. An oversight.

NaNoWriMo sets a goal of 50,000 words in a month. This shifts the goal from writing a good product -- to writing a large amount at all. This is, in my opinion, a good thing. There's a story form Atomic Habits about photography students at the University of Florida. I'm sure it's familiar to anyone who's ever thought of trying to improve their productivity, but in short:

Professor Jerry Uelsmann divided his students into two groups at the start of the semester. One would be graded on how many photos they took, and the other would be graded on how good a single photo they produced was.

At the end of the semester, the students who were being graded on quantity produced far better photos -- because they'd gone out and practiced the art of taking photos, seeing what worked and what didn't. The other group just sat around thinking and theorizing and never iterating.

NaNoWriMo forces you from the second group into the first. It forces you to produce, instead of thinking about producing. That's a good thing -- it means you'll be forced to improve -- but I think I've hit diminishing returns.

Seven years of churning out words. Seven years with insufficient reflection and no testing. I honestly think I've outgrown the benefits of the cram-like structure of NaNoWriMo because I've proven to myself I can get over the mental block of not writing and not producing and just sit down and force the words out, no matter what form they take.

Or have I?

NaNoWriMo was a great fit for me back in my college days, because of how unhealthy my relationship with sleep and work was. I would stay up late to cram, and so I was utterly indifferent to fitting an hour or two of writing into that already overburdened schedule. Especially since the burden was only for a narrow 4 weeks a year.

That, I think, was an unhealthy habit. Why bother learning to write consistently as much as necessary every day of the year, when I could jam in 50,000 in one month and count anything in the rest as a nice bonus?

That's how the past decade has felt, honestly. I know it's not true, but given what I have to show for all I've done it's how it feels. I viewed every creative endeavor as a discrete project or bundle that could be completed in one month and then neglected, left to rot, never improved upon for the other 11. I absolved myself from the most necessary of stages to actually become published -- the editing phase. And it's why I've found myself dreadfully unable to finish writing projects outside of the constraints of the dedicated writing month.

I know what the next phase of my growth as a writer must be: Writing consistently throughout the year. Every day, as needed, no matter what it takes.

And that makes breaking free of the novel writing Month.

4. I have other priorities.

But that's about my growth as a *writer*.

Contrary to my misanthropic blog posts, I try my best to live a full life. I have friends. A job. Familial obligations. Other projects which, for my own self-preservation and one-way anonymity, I won't disclose here (anyone who meets me in real life can find me online, anyone who can find me online hopefully won't have any clue who I am in real life.)

Writing is an uncertain way to make a living. Especially with the advent of Generative AI. The internet is filling with complete and utter slop, and while I have hope that human-created arts still have a place in the future, I refuse to stake my future on that.

After a certain point, after your big break, whether as a writer or something else, it changes. It becomes a fine way to survive. But unless you're really lucky there's a real risk you'll never truly be comfortable. When I was in college, I had the opportunity to staff a commemoration ceremony for a wise old journalist at The Water Club in New York.

You run this risk with many jobs in the creative arts. Less so with "regular" lucrative careers like finance or tech.

This November I am prioritizing other aspects of my life. In no particular order, they are:

I'm young. I want to meet people who are like me, one way or another. Aspiring novelists are part of that group, but as much as I deeply appreciate the writing groups and the friends I've made through them in real life, writing for me is inherently a solitary. I can retreat into solitude later in life and spend my time writing then -- but once I start doing so, I'll want assurance that I have a full life to return to once I'm done.

I have ambitions. Succeeding while young enough to enjoy the rest of life is time-sensitive. I've got two other projects that are eating a majority of my time -- 10-15 hours a week each, on top of a 40 hour a week job. That's time I can't spare on a novel -- at least, this year.

The option to write a novel will always be there -- until I go senile.

Conclusion

Once again I must distinguish between NaNoWriMo as an organization and NaNoWriMo as an act.

There's nothing morally objectionable about trying to write a novel or 50,000 words in the month of November. But the organization sucks and many reasonable people want nothing to do with them. Conveniently, the magnitude of their mediocrity has come to light at the same time I personally have reasons to not want to do NaNoWriMo.

You may consider this cowardly. You may, ultimately, consider it as slimy as crying "categorically banning generative AI is ableist" to raise the unimpeachable aegises of "NaNoWriMo enabled pedophiles" and "NaNoWriMo's endorsement of generative AI is an affront to the creative arts" and finish with the faint squib of "I have other things to do in my life."

Guilty as charged.

I've come to realize that I am bad at coding. Contrary to the “maker” ethos, I've come to wish I had more formal education in software engineering. Something I've noticed about the way I work is that I see a way to get something done and, having seen that, I brute-force my way towards that solution instead of investigating better solutions that might exist.

This is honestly an embarrassing predicament. I've been programming in some form or another since I was a kid — at first using MIT's visual coding language for kids, Scratch, then on my TI-84 in algebra class in middle school, and then with basic Python in 2015 for one of my first internships. Given this long history of "programming", one could be forgiven for thinking that I'm either exceptionally slow and dimwitted, or manipulatively self-effacing to be able to say without irony "I am bad at coding".

So in the interest of honestly, I suppose I can spare some time to discuss what I actually can make a computer do.

How I learned to Code

My first coding job was for a silicon wafer manufacturing corporation in 2015. This was the first time I used a "real" programming language, Python, for a "real" application outside of school projects. Boules of silicon, 60kg each, were grown from seed crystals into oblong cylinders in large incubators. For each of these incubators, there was a need for part maintenance — replacing the filters, seals, and crucibles.

I transcribed historical replacement and maintenance information into an Excel spreadsheet, and I graphed it using a line in Python using one of the many data analysis and graphing libraries so commonly used in data science.

It was a simple task, and it took me the whole summer.

Because my only guide at the time was google.

I learned more and more Python over the course of my undergrad and masters degrees, both in STEM.

All told, over the course of my two degrees and various internships, I ended up using Python (and it was almost always Python, though I dabbled in C++) for the following things:

• Modeling complex systems, usually physical ones like solar systems or quantum energy wells

• Numerical simulations, sometimes of the above, occasionally of financial markets

• Machine learning and regression

• Data science and statistics of any datasets

• Making charts of all sorts. Mostly of any of the above.

• Fancy and difficult math e.g. optimization and other forms of matrix math

Not, by any metrics, unimpressive.

And for my chosen life trajectory at the time, I thought this was enough. There's a survivable amount of money in even "boring", day-to-day 9-to-5 jobs if you have skills like these.

What I didn't learn to code

• How to build a website

• How to build an app that people would buy

• How to use Git

• Machine-level superfast code

• Graphics processing parallel code

Unfortunately, these are the forms of coding that have the tendency to make people a ton of money on their own.

These are the skills that:

1. Can be used to reach a mass audience

2. Can deliver a product directly

3. Are highly specialized and therefore highly in demand

I didn't learn any of these things because at the time I felt I didn't need to. Why build a website, in an age where content platforms were so ubiquitous? Why try to build apps with low levels of success when I could just get a job? Why learn to use Git if I was never sharing my work with anyone? Why learn Assembly-level code when most things simply didn't need it? Why bother with graphics processing if I wasn't interested?

The skills I developed were good for getting a job. For getting paid to do tasks. A path to a stable and consistent income — not an explosive one.

My Next Steps

Honestly? I'm not going to change much from a coding perspective. This is just a reflection on all of the kinds of "coding" out there and how being good at some coding can still keep you far, far away from anything else.

Could I still go back and learn? I'm sure I could.

I'm not sure what the best path forward for me is, however. All of these skills allow for greater flexibility — yet in my case, I might as well lever what I already know to do.

Sure, my skills are far more useful as part of a larger organization running risk or investigations for some greater strategy, but that’s hardly a reason not to try to take my chances on myself.

I've been reading Matthew Dicks's Storyworthy during my commute. My commute is tedious -- the lights on the train are yellow and harsh, and the text is small on my e-reader so I end up squinting my way through it, but the content is worth it. Storyworthy manages to embody "show, don't tell," by demonstrating the storytelling techniques it aims to teach through anecdotes of Dicks's personal life as he teaches them.

Storyworthy is a guide on how to translate events from your own life into compelling stories. I think it's tangentially relevant to public speaking and fiction, but make no mistake: its primary concern is the nonfiction of one's own life, told in front of other people in 5 minute chunks.

Of all the lessons, tips, and tricks in Storyworthy, one sticks out to me above all others: never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

In service of this, Storyworthy says there are five acceptable lies. Paraphrased, they are:

• Of Omission: leaving out elements that would detract. When people are around in real life, it's not because they're supporting characters to your story -- they're living their own lives. But when you tell your own story, you might as well leave them out.

• Of Compression: making events happen together closer than they really did. It's more dramatically satisfying to have an adventure happen over the course of one day rather than the course of one week.

• Of Assumption: giving an unremembered element an assumed specificity for more vivid imagery. For example, if you remember having an argument in the backseat of a car but not the specific model, you could say it's a green 2006 minivan to give the audience an idea of the cultural connotations you're aiming for.

• Of Progression: reordering events to make them more dramatically satisfying. Real life doesn't have clean beginnings, middles, and endings. It doesn't have clear rising actions or denouements. You might have a dramatic realization in the morning, an argument in the afternoon, and make up with your foe in the evening, but the story of the day might be more satisfying if the dramatic realization happens between the argument and the makeup.

• Of Conflation: making emotional growth happen in smaller timeframes or be associated with singular pivotal events. In real life, maturation is a slow, slow process. Puberty lasts nearly half a decade, and even after that, the human frontal lobe doesn't fully develop until the age of 25. Someone's slow growth over the course of a decade could fit in a novel but is a bad match for a short, snappy story told orally. So instead, for each story the slow growth of a decade gets associated with a single pivotal moment on a single pivotal day.

With three caveats:

1. Only lie to make a better story, not to make yourself look better.

2. Nothing should be made-up entirely, only altered from what actually happened.

3. Memory is imperfect and that should be acknowledged.

I'd like to think I fully understand the reasons for the first two caveats: first, lying to make yourself look better is what a braggart would do, and no one likes those. Second, making up something when you're supposedly telling a true story about yourself makes the whole thing less authentic and less resonant because you aren't drawing upon the well of true emotion within your soul.

The third caveat puzzles me ever so slightly. Yes, memory is fallible and imperfect. The very act of remembering something drags it from the depths of long-term memory, reconstitutes it and replays it in the front of the mind, and then sends that rebuilt memory back into the depths of remembrance, alterations and all. But what can you do about it?

A personal anecdote

When I was younger, I hoped desperately that magic was real. Bear with me here.

I held on to that delusion for longer than you'd expect. For longer than was strictly sensible. Even in high school, I played with a deck of Tarot Cards - not religiously, but often enough to make its mark. It was, like most forms of unscientific thinking, a way to hunt for meaning and power over my own life, breaking free from the net that society had woven around me.

It didn't work, because I put too much faith in things that could not, would not ever work. So eventually I abandoned those ideas and returned to the material world.

Of course, our world is filled with things that would've been magic fifty years ago. Computers, the internet adage goes, are rocks we tricked into thinking. Modern medicine can conquer most of the diseases that would've killed our ancestors. Agriculture has advanced so far that the current nutrition crisis is one of excess, not lack.

I could go on. But most of these forms of "magic" are far beyond the grasp of any one person - beyond my grasp.

Stories are something with a much lower barrier to entry. You don't need Med School or a family farm or a coding bootcamp to get started. You can just start -- open up a journal and start organizing the events of the day, or start a blog, or actively practice to become funnier than all of your friends. When you do that, if you want to be punchier, funnier, and more resonant, you'll have to start cutting your stories apart. To cut apart your own past.

That is the third caveat from Storyworthy. Our memories are imperfect, and therefore our relationships with our own pasts are imperfect. We don't understand why we did what we did, or how things that happened to us fundamentally changed how we see the world, until we force it back into the light and confront it. (Incidentally, there are therapy techniques that function on this same principle.)

By telling a story about our worst and best moments, we can reshape the narratives of our lives.

The willful transformation of one's own past into a saga where everything has meaning is magic. And it has a commensurate cost: giving up the truth of the past.

We live in an age where religion is fading. Many people no longer believe in the afterlife or any great moral authority granting meaning to life. We must find meaning for ourselves. Storytelling could be one way of doing that, but is the cost worth it?

I think it is. Through storytelling, we can transmute defeats into a teachable moments, inflection points in our lives that opened our hearts to pain or possibility and our eyes to our potential. The daily grind is often forgotten anyways, every monotonous day blending into the next. Overriding these stories of boring pasts with ones filled with meaning: It feels wrong to even suggest, to be frank.

But that's if we assume 'true memory' is sacred. It's not. We rebuild our memories with every recollection, but we also come up with rationalizations and tell ourselves various lies to get through the day. Very few go through life convinced that they are the villain of the whole world, at least not for long.

A "true past" that's full of boredom, meaningless, and chaos is a worthy sacrifice for a meaningful life.

What else I've been doing:

• I'm on Twitter and Bluesky now. Most of my current followers are bots. I wouldn’t mind if that changed.

• As you might have noticed, I've read Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks.

• I binge read the manga Bleach by Tite Kubo. I was first introduced to this work when I was 14, when one of my mother's family friends brought her children to stay at our house. If I had to summarize it in a (flippant) elevator pitch, I would say "A Japanese boy learns to accept himself to access the magical power of his soul in order to defend his friends and family from Japanese ghost bureaucrats, magical Christian Nazis, and skeletal Mexicans."

• Other than that, I've been absolutely exhausting myself in social events with my friends. My goal moving forward is to fix my sleep schedule for 11 pm every night and waking up early to work instead of working late.

But two concepts stuck with me as applicable beyond the project management sphere. These two concepts, in my opinion, have the power to transform any journey of self-improvement or creative pursuit.

These two concepts are SMART Goals and the Definition of Done.

Let's dive in.

SMART Goals

A SMART Goal is one that's specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. (Some versions use "realistic" or "results-based" instead of "relevant"). But why bother making your goals SMART?

Well, I've never managed to keep a New Year's Resolution. In the past, I would promise myself some lofty goal -- "this year, I'll be healthy". "This year, I'll be happy, work out, and make more friends." "This year, I'll take the jump and be a writer."

And then February rolls around, and I've stopped going to the gym, and I've only hung out with the same people, and I've barely written a thousand words in a month. And for the past 5 years, I don't think I've ever bothered with New Year's Resolutions.

I bet many of you can relate. To those who can't, I'm immensely jealous. Tell me your secrets.

There were many issues with my resolutions. They were too vague -- they didn't mean anything. "Be healthier." "Make more friends." "Be happy." Or, if they were more specific -- "I'll be a writer" -- what would progress in that look like? Anyone can buy coffee every day and stare at their laptop for hours on end and call themselves a writer without putting down a single word.

All of these structural failings are fixed by making the goals SMART to begin with.

I'll rewrite "I'll become a writer" with SMART goals as an example:

Specific: Instead of something as vague as "become a writer", I might say "I will write every day" or "I'll be an author with a significant presence in internet publications" or "I will have a novel that I can submit to agents". All of these are different kinds of "writing" -- they're specific, and potentially mutually exclusive.

Measurable: Writing can be tricky to measure because there are two big metrics of success. There's the act of writing itself, which can be measured easily in words or drafts, and there's the act of commercialization or marketing, which is measured in whether you can get someone to buy what you've written, or how many eyes end up on your work. If I were to make a goal for the first, I might say "I will write a 50,000 word novel in a month" or "I will write 500 words a day for the whole year" or "I will write 50 short-story drafts in a year". If I were targeting the second, I might say "I will submit to 30 internet magazines" or "I will have an agent". Unfortunately, that second set of metrics is not guaranteed, and the first kind can be separated into continual progress driven by the self alone, as opposed to depending on luck, finishing a big work, and gatekeepers.

Achievable: It's very important to make sure the goals are possible. If my definition of "Being a writer" was "be a published author on the New York Times bestseller's list", and I've never actually sold my writing to anyone, I'd have to be either very rich or very delusional. Conversely, for me, "write 1000 words a day" is very possible for me because I've been able to do so in the past.

"R": In my opinion, half the possible meanings of "R" have extensive overlap or are irrelevant to personal goals. Determining whether personal goals are "relevant" to yourself is of greater-scope than setting the goals themselves. Meanwhile, "realistic" might as well be a synonym for "achievable". I prefer "results-based" for setting personal goals. The examples I gave under the "measurable" criteria are also results-based, whether they're the result of having a body of work, or the result of being published. Which one you choose depends on which you think is achievable at the moment.

Time-bound: I'll give New Year's Resolutions one point in their favor: they have an implicit deadline of one year. If you don't achieve or stick to your resolution over that year, you've failed, so there's some time pressure. But we all implicitly know the importance of getting things done before the year is out, or carrying over momentum from one day to the next.

So a rewritten SMART goal version of "be a writer" might look like:

"This year, I will write 500 words a day on 90% of days," if my focus was on the act of writing itself. And if my focus was not just on developing as a creative worker but becoming a creative worker engaged with the world, I would say:

"This year, I will write a 50,000-60,000 word novel by October and submit it to at least 30 literary agents by the end of the year."

Once a goal is crystallized, there's something to reach for.

Subscribe now

Definition of Done

The "Definition of Done" from Agile project management methodology is exactly what it says it is. You define what "done" is for a given project, so you can stop doing that project and move on to the next one. What subtasks have to be finished or results achieved for the project/task to be "done"?

Another flaw with New Year's Resolutions is that there's no end to them. And if there's no "end", there's nowhere to stop. And if there's nowhere to stop, then they become a daunting commitment to permanent change. And when faced with something so overwhelming and daunting, it might be easier to not start at all.

This is where the power of the "Definition of Done" can shine. Whenever you set a goal for yourself or set on a project, define what it means to be "done" with it so you can know when to stop instead of fretting over it for hours longer than you need to.

I'll fully admit that the first time I saw this in the course I thought it was stupid, childish, and obvious. Of course you have to be" done" with a project. What else are you supposed to do with it? Obviously projects have end points!

Then I started actually thinking about it, and I realized that I had so many projects that I literally never finished. Or how I would write a story and then spend 6 months not publishing it anywhere, not even online for free. Imagine if I'd just given myself criteria for when it was okay to let go!

By having a definition of done, I've realized I can defeat my own perfectionism and anxiety. The work will never be perfect, but it will be done -- and I can take the lessons from it and move on to better things.

From my previous examples -- let's use "This year, I will write a 50,000-60,000 word novel by October and submit it to at least 30 literary agents by the end of the year."

We can actually break this down into multiple parts: Having a rough draft of a novel, having a finished novel, and having sent it to 30 literary agents. Each of these contains enough for their own definitions of done, and once I've done each, I can move on to the next. I can't create a final draft if I don't have a rough draft, and I can't send a draft out to agents if it doesn't exist. By knowing when each step is "done", I can move on.

And that's what I do with these newsletters. Get them done, no matter the form, the night before I send them out. I still have my bedtime to consider, after all.

Stuff I've consumed in the past week:

• Rereading some books: The Practice: Shipping Creative Work by Seth Godin and 12 Week Year again. These motivational works are easy to read and in some ways easy mental lubricant to keep the eye on the ball. You won't learn anything about yourself unless you actually do the hard work, but it's helpful to have a constant reminder to do so.

• John Woo's Red Cliff, about an iconic battle from the Chinese Epic Romance of Three Kingdoms. The western cut -- two hours of that was satisfying enough compared to five.

• Visited a bar that was also a bookstore. It was nice.

That's all for this week.

The quote is often used to grant meaning to a meandering, aimless life, which is a woeful misinterpretation. "Not all who wander are lost" is a very pretty and aspirational quote when stripped of context and left to stand alone. But as others have stated in the past, this is a misunderstood quote, stripped of necessary context. Ultimately, the mythic framework of LOTR is dangerous to transplant to real life, and the theme of unfulfilled destiny is better served by willful purpose.

Here's the full poem:

All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king.

— J.R.R. Tolkien

Subscribe now

I'm not going to do a deep literary analysis here. Maybe later. But it's been 70 years since the books came out so that well has likely been drawn dry.

The poem is not about a purposeless wanderer meandering about and somehow stumbling into greatness, but about someone born to a greatness denied them. "Not all who wander are lost" does evoke the image of the vagrant or ronin, but immediately the next lines hint towards a core fundamental strength -- "the old that is strong", and "deep roots". The eventual triumph is not one spontaneously generated, but a restoration of a birthright -- a "renewal". Cutting off the poem at any point changes the message drastically.

Textually, the poem is about the character Aragorn, also known as Strider. He is of royal blood, but he was raised in exile and lives as a wandering Ranger with no kingdom. He does not wander because he is lost, but because his kingdom is denied to him, and due to his divine birthright and inner strength, he will one day restore it from its destroyed state.

But The Lord of the Rings operates on mythic fantasy rules, while our world does not. The fantasy epic is driven by themes of destiny, virtue, honor, divine right, and the human spirit will triumph in the short scale, even if the world is in a process of slow decay. Our world is different. We may be born with advantages and differences in circumstance, but no one takes the idea of divine right or destiny seriously anymore. Virtue, honor, and the human spirit can be pillars of a good life, but merely having them is no guarantee of success.

Aragorn was born with a destiny, but in the real world, no one is, and without a teleological destiny as birthright, wandering risks leading to an unsatisfying life. I met an old man once who had done journalism in New York City for most of his life. The conversation was years ago, and I have regrettably forgotten most of his wisdom, but I still remember one piece of advice: find something to believe in. For him, it was the Church, and God. But he was very clear it didn't have to be God, Christianity, or even religion at all. He simply suggested having something, whether it be higher power or a driving purpose.

Since life doesn't come with an inherent purpose, the smartest and best thing to do is to define one for yourself. This is a lesson repeated in every self-help book: figure out what you want your future to include so you can align yourself with it, and chase it. Whether you set goals or not, you'll get exactly where you want to go.

But what if you really like the sentiment of the isolated quote "not all who wander are lost"?

Then make wandering your purpose in life! It'll be harder to do than to say, but it's definitely easier than it seems. Books that provide a roadmap to this include Tim Ferriss's 4 Hour Workweek espouses a philosophy of "lifestyle design". Bill Perkins's Die With Zero says to spend your money to bring you maximum lifetime fulfillment/happiness. You can target a life of travel, of leisure, of itinerant wandering if you consciously make choices to enable and chase that lifestyle. Find a way to make travelling, exploring, roaming, whatever it is not just a "thing you do" in your life but the purpose of your life, and you can embody the sentiment. Abandon the conceits of inner strength and "divine right to rule" and all the other things implied by the source poem for a destiny of your own choice, and the strength of that original quote can be yours without the baggage.

Subscribe now

My next plans

I don't know my full myth arc yet. My perfect future hasn’t fully crystalized. But I can see enough of it to know how I could get there.

I said I'd do this last week: a retrospective on this phase of my creative journey and a reorientation for going forward.

I read the 12 Week Year at some point. Perhaps I took the message of incremental change from it a bit more strongly. But in the past 12 weeks, I'd say I've achieved a healthy amount. Not quite as optimistically as I'd have liked to, but enough.

I wrote consistently, and in doing so I realized what I'd have to do to achieve my goals.

I read Austin Kleon's Show Your Work. (He also writes on Substack, if you're interested). One of the fundamental points is that at all stages of the creative process, you should be getting feedback in some way, shape, or form. I didn't take this lesson to heart at first, by doing work that was ultimately unrelated to my long-term creative goals. Roughly 5 weeks in, that was when I realized the futility of mimicking others and pivoted to writing small snippets of ideas I'd been sitting on.

Over the next 3 months, I'll work on adapting them. Both to longer-form essays overall, and to Youtube videos. Regrettably, I may also join Twitter (currently known as X) under this handle and make statements, art, and promotion under that.

That Google Project Management Course I've mentioned in the past? Still need to polish it off and finish the capstone. But once I've done that, I'll honestly probably work on moving some of the teachings to the rest of my life. Or, at the very least, doing a self-help book a week like a shitty drug in order to keep the general principals fresh.

I'm helping a few friends with a project with real-world implications. Hoping that goes well on its own terms, but I'm trying to maintain an illusion of privacy, so you'll hear about it after the fact.

I've got ideas for a few other long-form fiction projects going on. I've written fanfiction in the past, unfortunately, and lost momentum on those projects for some reason. Perhaps it's time to set a lofty goal: a short novel in the next 12 weeks, and something similar every cycle thereafter. We'll see how far I get with that.

I may be a hopeless romantic. But I feel that by trying to create, to become art, your life becomes far fuller than not doing so. And even failure is beauty of its own -- a statement that can only be made from a place of relative comfort.

Subscribe now

I have yet to make it big on Substack.

Whether that's because of a failure of the algorithm, a lack of social engagement, or simply a failure to add value, I cannot know.

But I've learned some valuable lessons and so as we come to the soft end of this quarter, I'd like to take some time to reflect.

The good:

• I've started writing again, on a consistent schedule: This has helped me flourish at every level, creatively. Just getting into the habit of churning out 100, 200, 1000 words a week for a blog post builds room for other writing.

• It's helped me break out of my comfort zone as a writer: I've been writing my whole life, as early as I can remember. Much of it is lost, much of it was bad, and much of it I don't want to share here for personal reasons because it's irrelevant.

• I've narrowed my focus: Originally, I was writing about periodic news updates. That felt derivative, pointless, and worst of all, tedious. So, 4 weeks in, I hard pivoted to writing what I actually wanted to write, content I thought was interesting and that hopefully could be interesting to others.

• I've learned what I'm doing doesn't work: this kind of self-reflection is useful.

So if you have any interest in the act and art of writing, you should make a habit of writing often. And Substack is a great platform for holding yourself to a schedule and sending your work out.

Subscribe now

The bad:

• I haven't narrowed my focus: People want to listen to experts who have things to say about the great myth-arcs of their lives. I currently appear as a dilettante. Charitably, the equivalent of a wandering storyteller. So I remain on this journey to find my artistic voice, even now.

• I've grown disillusioned with the stuff that crosses my Substack feed: So much of it is writers pumping up other writers or the act of writing itself. And it makes me wonder whether the heyday of the platform is past, and I should be looking elsewhere for growth and an audience. Realistically, I know that persistence is key -- but both Odysseus and Sisyphus were persistent, yet only one got any reward for it. The Act of Writing About Writing for the Sake of Writing is only of interest to writers: Onanism.

• I see no path to profitability: I'm not approaching this from a place of rampant and unrestrained greed, but rather the hope of financial freedom. But I'll be blunt. Substack is a monetization-forward platform. And, distressingly, my greatest path towards growth has been promoting to people in real life. In no world would I ever consider pumping people in real life for money to pay for my unfocused, sporadic ramblings. If I can't make a living through Substack alone, then by definition I will need to go elsewhere.

The downside of Substack is that it's just a blog. All under your control. There's no guarantee anyone will ever see it, and if they do, that they'll engage. Over 11 weeks I haven't had a single like or comment, so all the benefits have been through internal transformation. But that's simply the reality of radiating creative work into the world instead of directing it towards the most efficient ways of building a platform: if you're not intentional, you have to deal with what you get.

I've accepted that, for now, but it's time to become intentional

Next week, I'll cover what I plan to do next. This week's a bit shorter than normal, because I'm on a vacation to Quebec.

Once again my poor time management has left me unable to write fragments of my larger scale essays, so this is going to be off the cuff. Laconic. Conversational.

This week, I had a few fateful encounters.

In a fateful encounter, I met someone who had a chance to change the future trajectory of my life. Though perhaps it's better to think of them as missed connections. Missed encounters.

My parents had invited me back to their home, to attend a heritage event. A cookout and potluck. I gladly went; I'm never one to refuse grilled meat and fried food. My goal, at first, had simply been to relax and gorge myself in food I usually abstained from, and read through a good book.

My mother of course enjoys socializing, and she took it upon herself to introduce one of her less-well-known friends to me. An internet friend who she'd just invited to grab food for himself. A spry old man and his wife.

There was something familiar about the both of them, though I had never seem them before. The cadence of their words, or how they held themselves, or perhaps the angle of their noses? I could not say, until they spoke. And everything fell into place.

Their sons had gone to the same schools as I had, all those years ago. We had taken the same classes, done the same extracurriculars, spent time around the same people. We weren't close. I had never met his parents, after all. Yet his parents had known mine for who knows how long?

I could almost see that path of forced socialization, of being forced to get along by status of family friendship -- but I also know that I, like most in their teenage years, had been deeply unpleasant. So it was fate, in a way, to only meet after those volatile days were long past, and I had adjusted to the humdrum routine of adulthood.

That was the first fated encounter.

The second fateful encounter, I shall only speak about obliquely.

I met an angel from heaven, yet every moment that I did I was trapped on earth. The time we spent together was wonderful, and when I look back I shall treasure it, yet I can't help but feel tainted by regret. Regret that I was trapped in my own mind, and in my own form.

When we spoke, there was a resonance. Something real, I would like to believe. Yet we spoke of veils. Of the masks we wear in society, and around all other humans. And how we knew we both wore masks, hiding ourselves, and how others, too, hid them. And perhaps we let a little bit of the truth out from behind the masks, but how could we know?

I would like to believe that I saw behind the mask, just a little.

But I know that was only because I was allowed to see.

So what was fateful about any of this?

Nothing. Because fate isn't real. Because there's no grand telos to our lives, dictated from above. There is only us. That's the default answer, the easy answer to give. That fate is a delusion best left in a bygone age, and that all that happens is but the sum total of molecules vibrating against each other, up and up and up the hierarchy of size.

And yet that's an awfully cold way to look at the world. I tried it once. It saddened me. Accepting the meaninglessness in everything is an important stage in growth, but to stay there is to stagnate. Life is meaningless, yes, but that means it can take any meaning we give it.

And that, perhaps, is why I wonder at the efficacy of the heroic delusion. The chance encounter in life, the random meeting on the street -- you could view it as the random chaos as it is, or you could imbue it with sacred and portentous meaning.

The obvious pitfall is that of every delusion. I am, most likely, not the hero of the world. You are not the hero of the world. Each of us is always, at least, but most likely only the heroes of our own stories -- and most of us are unsuited to be leading men or leading ladies. The hero is arrogant, narcissistic, divinely blessed. Unbearable.

There was a period of my life in college when I was drinking a quarter of a shot of rum every night. Not enough to get me drunk, but enough to get me buzzed on my horrifically low tolerance. I woke and slept with the taste of alcohol at the back of my throat. Mentally, I thought I was doing fine. Yet I drifted further and further from reality.

I suppose I've always had a little bit of difficulty understanding other people -- one of the perils of the unsocialized intelligent -- but this was truly a low period for me. I saw one of my classmate's grades, and brought it up to her in passing. They weren't great, and as a result some of our mutual friends decided not to work with me on a final project that would determine a good portion of our grades in the class.

I had meant nothing rude by it, but my intent weighted little on how the actions were received. I'm not proud of it. It was an intrusive violation of privacy and an insult to her pride as a student. If I could take that back, I would. Yet no true retribution came. The people who thought I was unfriendly, cold, and arrogant continued to think that. The people who considered me a friend continued to consider me one.

There was just one risk: the matter of the class. Since I had no one to do the final project with, I instead chose to take a final exam and hopefully get a decent grade . The day of the final exam rolled around, and our professor smiled at us kindly and lazily. We were told to pull out a piece of paper, and upon it, write the grade we thought we deserved.

I gave myself an A. And I got it.

What did I actually learn? That there was no justice -- but, since I believed in a cold and uncaring world at the time, I already knew that. No, I couldn't help but escape the gnawing feeling that I was divinely blessed. Buoyed by the winds of fate. Doomed to escape the negative consequences of my actions.

Later on I got (much closer to) sobriety, and that particular delusion hasn't reared its head since.

So many heroes come from humble beginnings. Christ was born in a manger to refugee shepherds, despite later claims of his descent from Kings David and Solomon. In the modern day, everyone of European descent is also descended from Charlemagne, and a good portion of Asia is descended from Genghis Khan. It is more likely than not that the blood of royalty runs through your veins, a thousand times diluted. If we live in that heightened world of fairy tale princes and royal blood, then most of the world is eligible to be a secret hidden royal heir.

The logical conclusion is to dispense with logic entirely.

Any event in your life can be contorted to extract a moral lesson. Fundamentally it's more satisfying to believe that everything has a purpose, that it's a stepping stone from who you were yesterday to who you were always meant to be.

That can be your salvation, or it can be the worst trap you'll ever fall into. Approach each encounter as if it had a lesson to impart, and you'll be forced to reflect, and clamber towards growth. Yet you might also turn eternally in a gyre for encounters with no obvious moral lesson.

But even that is far preferable to the darkest of fates: Believing that every event is affirmation of your heroism. That everything that ever happens to you is never your fault, but always your achievement. That you are the savior of this world, and that you can do no wrong.

For then you have truly left the realm of mortal men to join the delusions of the gods.

Regarding this more laconic style, I'll note that my last post, the outrageously named "The Fire of the Internet", got a whole 5 more views than my previous works. A whole 5. A 50% increase! Clearly I did something right, or maybe I asked someone in real life to look at my stuff and that had a big effect. Who knows?

Subscribe now

The internet tends to enflame passions.

Perhaps this is an understatement. The internet gives voice to the voiceless and mad alike, and twists the first to the second, pouring oil on the embers of annoyance until it becomes an inferno of unquenchable rage.

You don't see this as much in the workplace. At least, in my experience. Perhaps I've naive, or supremely lucky, or I made my own luck. But it feels to me that once substantial compensation is in the equation, petty tempers are pushed aside to instead satisfy a great goal: "I don't want to lose my job."

But the internet, though it has enabled many, even the most undeserving, to become rich, releases those fetters.

I am a member of another writing community, which I will not name here; I purposefully chose to try to make a clean start, at least at first. And when I tell this story, I suppose I will force that line to be drawn even deeper in the sand. I've stripped out every identifying detail, yet I still feel uncomfortable sharing my perspective on events.

Most of the social interaction of this writing community didn't happen on the platform itself. How could it? A writing site exists primarily to host writing. All other functions are secondary.

The larger community differed from much of the rest of the internet in one tedious and onerous way: it had a centralized bureaucracy, almost byzantine in nature, where there was a semblance of "separation of powers", and where the left hand existed to bind the right. There were ways to get written works deleted off the site, and ways to ban users from the platform and the community. These were the only two powers that mattered; all others emanated from them, to give members of that ridiculous bureaucracy things to do.

Yet all other functions were secondary.

No, most of the interactions happened on a chat platform. Discord. The name was chosen by its corporate owners, yet it was an accurate description of the conversations that occurred there.

This community had a few hubs of interaction. There were a few central Discord servers, one official, many not, each created by prominent community members to suit their own personal tastes. And beyond those, there were smaller servers. Personal servers, where community members and authors spoke only with those they considered genuine friends.

These small, intimate chats -- almost like lounges, or clubs perhaps -- were where people spoke their minds. In the centralized servers, fights were shut down before they could truly happen, stopped from boiling over into something fought in the light. So instead these petty grievances and misunderstandings were vented among their fellows, where slowly they festered.

(Ask yourself what kind of person must rely on getting angry on the internet as their primary coping mechanism.)

It was in these lounges that anger festered. And yet everyone who stuck around the community, everyone who wasn't an internet vagrant merely passing through those central Discord servers, joined a lounge or club eventually. If you didn't, it meant that no one liked you enough to spend time with you -- an outcast even among outcasts who had found community.

It wasn't uncommon to be a member of multiple such clubs or lounges, filled with people spanning the whole of the wider community -- though of course things shifted as times changed.

I found myself caught between two such groups.

One group, a dominant social force in the wider community, its membership overlapping substantially with the staff byzantium of bureaucracy, having joined that august hierarchy with the goal of reforming the old, corrupt order. The other, a circle of outcasts and iconoclasts, who took pride in breaking stupid rules, with the hopes of causing positive change in the community at large. Two groups of idealists at heart.

Bear in mind that as lofty as I may paint them, I'm still describing an internet writing community. One where the community norms are heavily against payment against any kind. In short, the only currency, if there was any at all, was reputation -- if that.

They were friends once. The lead iconoclast, and the head bureaucrat. If not friends, colleagues. Working on large projects together. They shared stewardship of one of those larger community spaces.

Yet without money, there was no power or hierarchy. Without those, there were deadlines. The only thing keeping any project together was goodwill.

Goodwill is like lantern oil. The light stays bright for as long as there's any, but the fire eats away at it, slowly but surely. Replenishing it through acts of kindness and reciprocity keep the fire burning, but if you take those around you for granted, you may find yourself burning through all your goodwill, dumping you into the darkness.

The small things built up long before their formal "falling out". Public barbs and sarcasm, unclear if they were in jest. Unilateral actions. Collaborations withdrawn. Edits to shared works, without consultation. Small things. Things that could've been resolved with conversation.

But it was easier to vent. To release the anger where the other could not see, in their private lounges. The anger, the regret, the derision.

I saw it from both.

The bureaucrat respected the byzantine rules of the community at large; the iconoclast respected no rules at all. Their partnership had been an odd one from the start; I was never privy to its inner workings. Yet the iconoclast, through pushing boundaries, gradually became exiled from the official spaces, one by one.

So by the time the final straw broke, they had few friends remaining in their corner.

Tensions were running high. There was a writing contest of a sort, and they were working together in honor of their friendship. Perhaps "together" was the wrong word. The bureaucrat designed the work as finely as any regulation, and populated with words. The iconoclast chose the color of the paper it would sit on.

And then, as the deadline was in sight, the iconoclast sent someone a grievous insult. The kind of insult that gets people permanently exiled.

In private. Supposedly, in jest. But the other person didn't take it that way.

I was told that this insult was meant as a joke. Perhaps it was. But it was against the explicit rules and guidelines of almost every public space in that community.

Scant hours after the iconoclast sent that insult, they had been banished from every major community hub they did not control. Beyond that, they were exiled from the projects they shared with the bureaucrat.

This was an outrage, an injustice, an usurpation. A theft of shared ownership. The idea was theirs in the beginning, and it could not continue without them.

This was necessary, a cutting of ties. A removal of someone who had long since become a liability, who was kept around like a charity case. Who had slowly become more and more difficult to work with.

This was something cheered by people whose patience had long been burned through, and bemoaned by those who thought it had come out of nowhere.

They'd been friends for years, shared creative projects for almost as long, and yet the cutting of ties was total and final. The iconoclast's name, stripped from all shared works. Their contributions purged, as if they had never been. And exile, from everywhere.

I saw the frustrations on both ends. The attempts to invoke the heaviest hand of the bureaucracy, and get the other removed from the community permanently and irrevocably. I saw the plans and frustrations on both ends. I saw the justifications, whether righteous or self-righteous. And I stood by.

Because I thought it was unfair. It's unfair to cut off a friend with no warning, and I could easily imagine it happening to me. Some people don't take well to hints and need to be told things directly. Yet it's unfair to expect people to keep tolerating you forever. And, I must add, I disagreed fundamentally with the mindset that led to slur use. In me, there was a pointless, righteous anger.

Because I had nothing to gain from fueling the fires on either side. The melodrama would play out whether I had any hand in it or not, and my bleeding heart thought of them all as friends at one point. It still does. In me, there was sadness that they couldn't just all get along.

Is there a good side or a bad side? Was anyone truly in the right?

It doesn't matter.

Because despite the grand dressings and turns of phrase I've given it, it was an internet community of a few thousand people at most, but with maybe 50 major players in the petty slapfights and catfights. An internet community. Small, insular petty. Nested chatrooms. Nothing grand. Only base. Like a high school, or maybe a university.

This is a story like Macbeth: told by an idiot, full of sound of fury, signifying nothing.

A story that traps us in it -- how could it not? It is a story that uses our own lives as its components, ourselves as its components -- yet the only moral to gain, if one manages to escape, is that it wasn't worth it.

And yet the fires of rage keep burning in their hearts, even still. It's easy to forget the human on the other side of the screen, but it's impossible to escape yourself. Or you could build the warmth of genuine friendships that could a lifetime, beyond your interest in the writing or the community. The choice is everyone's to make, and one is far better to bear with you than the other.

Share

Leave a comment

Leave a comment

On to the content.

What is a Job?

Continuing on from last week, what's the value you get from a job? Stable employment.

For the purposes of simplification, I'll be describing this with the assumptions of a corporate white-collar job. A steady, fixed paycheck on a salaried basis.

Obviously this doesn't apply to all jobs, but this setup allows us to make certain simplifying assumptions for the purpose of illustrative analogy.

Let's start with the base case:

You get a comfortable job that pays 60,000 per year out of college. You'll never get a raise but you'll never get fired. And to simplify the calculation, it pays at the end of the year. How much is this job worth to you, assuming you never die?

This is a perpetuity -- an investment product that pays a fixed amount to its holder forever. Perpetually. A sweet deal, if you can get someone to sell you one for less than it's worth. (Note: this is probably a fool's errand.)

A nuance of the approximation is that in this analogy you’re not paying an upfront fee but rather contributing time or labor for payment. For this base case, I make the assumption that the payments will be roughly the same no matter how hard you work. As many gurus say, a job is a trade of time for money. Yet once you get a job, it’s often hard to lose it, so what’s the value of it to you once you get it?

Perpetuities and Annuities

Why doesn't a deal that gives you free guaranteed money forever have infinite value? Because money you get tomorrow is worth less than money you have today. Sure, you might get 60,000 next year and two years from now, but if the price of everything doubles in the year between, your 60,000 2 years from now is equivalent to getting 30,000 next year. This is the concept of "time value of money", and it means that the "present value" of any future cash flow will be discounted by the interest rate as follows.

You can add the present values of any cash flows together, no matter how far apart in time those cash flows are, so long as you discount to present value first. We call this the “Net Present Value”

Using the above, because of a convenient trick of mathematics, if the value of cash flow CF is the same in all time periods, the value of a perpetuity is CF/r.

If we assume a 5% interest rate, pretty close to the 2024 interest rate environment, this job would be worth 1.2 million dollars. (We simulate this numerically using 300 years, which is long enough that it might as well be infinite.)

Net Present Value: $1,200,000

(Note that in a true zero interest-rate environment, any perpetuity would have infinite value. However, larger payments would still be better since you get more of the money earlier, and in that environment any investment that grows faster would still be preferable, because it brings you a greater fraction of that infinity faster. But in the real world, perpetual 0 interest rates do not exist; we tend to assume one dollar will be worth less in ten years than it is now and hope that it won’t be worth more.)

We can make this a little more realistic (still not by much) by assuming you won't have the job forever, you'll only keep it for 40 years -- another structure called an annuity. We can model this by subtracting a perpetuity with the same payment terms, but starting 41 years in the future from our existing perpetuity, or we can brute-force it using computers. This way of thinking perpetuities and annuities was introduced to me by one of my professors from my Master's Degree, Dr. David Shimko.

Net Present Value: $1,030,000

That comes out to a Net Present Value of about 1.03 million. This starter job for the course of your career would be worth right about 1 million dollars.

(I built these visualizations with a Dash App which I'll be releasing once I've added a few more features, so you can play around with different salaries and interest rates.)

Not bad -- if you have no perspective. If interest rates never change, if the value of money stays the same, if all you want to sustain yourself. But if you ever want to buy a house, you'd have to take out a loan, if you ever have a kid you're down around 330k according to USDA data. If inflation goes up even more then your money's worth even less, and so on.

Crucially, look at the columns labeled "Present Value". Under our current assumptions, that $60,000 you're getting 40 years from now is worth less than $10,000 to you today. It would be completely illogical to commit to working for 40 years in the same place for a final payoff with a value of $10k.

But these are some very gloomy assumptions. Obviously you won't get no raises over the course of an entire career. And inflation is targeted to 2%, so there's some predictability there. And 60,000 is a lower-end salary that can be raised by intentionally pursuing high base-salary fields of study. (But, on the flip side, you could be on an hourly wage, or a gig worker, or an artist with intermittent income.) On the bright side, all of these can be modeled, which I'll do in following weeks.

But then there's the final risk. The elephant in the room.

You could always get fired. Or more positively, you could quit.

The first few years of this example job have the most value to you, after which it starts to seriously diminish. At what point have you extracted everything of value? At what point would it be worth leaving for greener pastures? How can you tell the leap of faith from security to risk is worth it?

These are questions I aim to explore in further depth in later works.

Other Stuff

• Unfortunately, I've fallen off of my reading habit, at least of actual books. Instead, on my commute, I've been reading translated Japanese Light Novels. Again, I lament how there's a clear and obvious path for Japanese independent authors -- the equivalent of Anglophone fanfiction writers -- to getting book deals and animated adaptations for works of highly variable quality. Wouldn't want the other aspects of Japanese work culture though. This week's poison has been "Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs" and "I'm the Evil Lord of an Intergalactic Empire", both by Yomu Mishima. They're alright if a bit heavy in action and smugness and thin on philosophical depth.

• Twitter user smallworlds got a licensing deal for “short scifi stories”. This is deeply inspiring as a creative. The consistency and the grind paid dividends, though the shortform format and incisive satire probably didn't hurt.

• I emailed Dr. Lance Fortnow about his article Computation Is All Around Us, and You Can See It if You Try, and we had a very interesting back and forth. Basically, the article is a meditative reflection on how computation *feels*, and I always enjoy getting a look into the thought processes of others.

• I worked on learning Dash for Python to build the charts for this post.

The Black-Scholes Model

The Black-Scholes Model is the basic model used to value financial options. According to the Chicago Board of Exchange, on the day I'm writing this, over 17 million options with total notional value of $12 billion. There's a lot at stake, so properly valuing these things right is important. My recent interest in it is as an analogy or model for personal risks and decision-making.

Please don’t be intimidated by this equation. There are hundreds, if not thousands of explanations of Black Scholes online and elsewhere. I will attempt to describe it in exactly enough detail so that it's useful for analogies but not so much that people who don't like math decide to never subscribe.

A call option is a financial contract that lets you buy a stock for a pre-determined price, K, at some point in the future. If the stock is worth less than K, you obviously wouldn't want to do this, so it's worth 0 to you, but you're not in debt from having bought it (ideally). But if it's worth more than K, you can immediately turn around and sell it for its market price and pocket the difference. So the payoff of a call option is at least:

Or, in plain English the higher between 0 and S-K.

Why would you buy something like this? Because you think the stock will go up, and want to get more bang for your buck than just buying shares. Alternatively, you already own the stock, and by selling a call option you could guarantee you sell it for K.

So how do you actually price something like this? Sure, you make out like a bandit if S goes to the moon (as they say these days), but you get nothing if it doesn't hit your strike. Ultimately, your payoff is an uncertain, probabilistic thing.

That's where the Black-Scholes Equation comes in. Let's look at it again.

The function N is the normal distribution of the value inside.

K is the strike price, as discussed above: the price you can buy your asset for. It's decided when you buy your option and doesn't change.

r is risk-free interest rate, how much money you could get if you bought the safest possible investment. This is publicly known.

τ is the time to maturity/expiry, the last date you can use your option. This is generally decided when you buy an option, and is therefore known at any given time.

e is Euler's number, roughly 2.718.

σ is the volatility, a measure of uncertainty. This is the only parameter that is unknown.

For analogies, the important thing is that

1. 1) the BS equation is applied to stuff that it doesn't apply to and

2. 2) in so many practical applications, we work backwards.

We don't know what volatility actually is or should be, and our best option is price. So we put the price in and work backwards to get volatility.

(But if the product depends on two different volatilities, then there's a very real chance this goes pear shaped and you get nonsensical results. I've seen this a few times in my career.)

What's the dummy input? Volatility.

This is all well and good for stocks which have lots of actively traded options. If you know the prices at any given time, you can get an estimation of volatility and have a reasonable indication of how everyone else expects the stock to behave at the present time.

But if you don't have a price and you want to estimate it, then you're in for a bit of trouble. At that point you've got to rely on increasingly questionable volatility estimates.

Despite that major caveat, the Black-Scholes model remains an immensely powerful and sophisticated bit of technology.

Anyways, I bring this up as the necessary caveat for any analogies to options models.

Last week I broke down a human life as debt or equity. In this analogy, working a job is like debt, while everything else in your life is like equity, where the currency involved isn't money per se but time. A very imprecise model and rough and confusing analogy.

The Merton Model is an application of the Black Scholes model that models the risk of a company's default by treating stock equity as a call option on the value of the whole company, with a strike price at the value of the liabilities/debt. You can do this because, in most corporate structures, debt holders are paid first and equity holders only get what's remaining, but equity holders aren't liable for debts after bankruptcy. Therefore, the value of equity is at most the total asset value minus debt, but at least zero.

Now, simplistically (I am drawing from Wikipedia here), the general idea is that equity shareholders would choose to repay the company's debt if the company is worth more than the debt, while they wouldn't if the company is worth less than the debt. A shockingly profound observation. But the translation to this space is what allows the application of the Black Scholes formula, and the determination of volatilities and from that probabilities. You know the equity market value of a public company from the stock market and you generally know how much debt it has from its various corporate filings, so if you define a time horizon and have a reasonable guess of asset volatility, you can back out your probabilities.

Let's say a modern life consists of Job + Everything Else.

We say Job is like Debt, and Everything Else is like Equity.

So if we use the Merton Model as an analogy, the odds of someone quitting their job depends on how much they value their life against their job. A shockingly profound observation.

I want to do more reading on the Merton model before developing this idea further, and play around with the math, but I've got other thoughts on simpler models. Ones that can actually help drive decision making.

Quitting Your Job

How do you value the option to quit your job? Quit or change -- the decision is agnostic if we make a few simplifying assumptions but complicating ones are also possible.

I'll be assuming that there's an abstraction of your "life" as L. L is a combination of your life fulfillment, how much you could get at any point from another job, and so on and so forth.

We can say that at any given point, your job has some monetary or cash value. Let's say that's the strike K. We can model this cash value as a perpetuity or annuity, though in reality layoffs are far more common than one would expect.

Obviously there are issues from comparing a nonfinancial abstraction of life value with the money you'd gain from a job.

Let's say then you have the option to leave your job at any time. We imagine the payoff to be the below.

This is an asymmetric payoff: the value you get from willingly leaving your job will never be nothing. It'll always, at worst, be a neutral decision. This is not quite how reality works, but bear with me, because conversely your job has the option to fire you at any given time. In a sense you can imagine an employment contract as a strip of biweekly fixed payments with a possibility of annual growth, where each payment has embedded within it the option for you to quit and the option for the employer to fire you, after which you give up all future payments.

So realistically what we're actually looking at is:

The money you get from your job plus Your option to leave minus Their option to fire you

And for simplicity's sake we're abstracting this to one period (at first).

So let's imagine L is much, much greater than K. You have a full and fulfilling life, and enough money to fund it in excess to all the future cash you would get from your job. At that point, you lose nothing from leaving.

Conversely, imagine that your job is all you have in your life. No friends, no fulfillment, and somehow your money leaves your pocket as soon as you get it.

L=K.

At that point, your option to quit your job is worth nothing, and you gain nothing from exercising it. L changes, of course, if you get a new job offer or gain a wellspring of hope, but if you have nothing else, don't leave.

You might be able to tell I'm using these ideas as more of a scratchpad. Here's where I think I'll explore next:

There's a concept called put-call parity, that defines the value of a put and a call to overall value and strike price. I couldn't figure out an elegant way to define a put here, so I'll save that for the longform. But the put just happens to analogize to their option to fire you, in the same way your option to leave analogizes to the call.

My hope is to develop this into a full heuristic for knowing when and how to quit your job, supported by some of the most state-of-the-art financial mathematics underlying all modern finance.

Other Stuff From My Life

I recently discovered "rucking," which is walking but you carry weights on your back when you do it. This is similar to my commute every day back when I was in college. I was also unaware I was lactose intolerant when I was in college and had a terrible sleep schedule, so any health benefits were probably balanced out. Instead, I've taken to carrying about 10 pounds of stuff in my backpack when I take my daily commute, which realistically only includes 30 minutes of walking per day. Still, ever since I started my new job, I've been exercising significantly less consistently -- so a passive full body workout is just what I need, a concept I discussed in Micro-optimizations.

I read Sheryl Sandberg's Option B on my commute. I think as a work of art it's at cross-purposes with itself. I respect it as a meditation on grief and the process of growing stronger from it. I respect her intent to use her platform to raise awareness of examples of people who have moved past their grief and became stronger for it. But I think the interleaving of personal anecdotes with societal anecdata in order to advocate for stronger social programs for those less fortunate than the author weakens the overall message of advocacy.

Also, I read the passage about her visit to SpaceX and meeting with Elon Musk the same day Elon announced he would be donating $45 million a month to Donald Trump's reelection. The social advocacy of the book is, at the very least, blunted by the choice of strange bedfellows.

I've read some truly terrible Japanese media in the past week or so. I'm not sure why, as opposed to reading other parts of my backlog of stuff to read. What strikes me is that the worst of it is really, really similar to the Harry Potter fanfiction I read as a kid. Overly successful main characters, blushing maidens, overexplained magic systems, high schoolers with disproportionate amounts of power... However, there's one major difference. Japanese media that fits this category, like "Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian", get anime adaptations, which may as well be mass media.

My understanding is that this is much rarer in the west. Romance novels on Wattpad sometimes get Netflix film adaptations, but I suspect that's much rarer for other genres and platforms.

And it's unclear to me why. Maybe the infrastructure and pipeline is just there in Japan. Maybe lonely nerds are more profitable and have more disposable income in Japan. I have no idea.

Ultimately, it seems the western web serial author walks alone.

Please. Correct me if I'm wrong. But this is why I decided to get a stable job before pursuing a life as a writer.

Leave a comment

My Problem, and Possibly Yours Too

I've been trying the newsletter gig for 4 weeks now, and I've come to an important conclusion:

It's not worth it.

I initially began the plan of writing and posting a newsletter to get into the habit of posting essay-form content online, but this was uniquely unsuited for my experience and personality.

Let me explain. Here's what I've been doing:

I've been making mental note of interesting news that I see in spare moments during the week, thinking of commentary on it, and providing 2-3 bits of it. I write that up, and send it out in my newsletters.

Sounds simple, right? There's a really low barrier to entry. And it's a great business model for things like Morning Brew, a newsletter founded by a college student in his dorm room that gives you everything you need to know about the markets in one easy morning email.

But that's just the thing: it's good -- so good that it's become an actual media juggernaut. The world doesn't *need* more Morning Brews because one already exists. The world only needs "content" with a unique value proposition -- your Matt Levines i.e. subject matter experts who can shed a particular insight on extremely niche fields or Andrew Yeungs i.e. community members and salesmen who bring people together and give them a chance at advancement.

I am not formally trained as a journalist, nor a lawyer, nor a sociologist, economist, or anthropologist. And, for now, I am hiding behind pseudonymity. What I have is over a decade of existing on the internet, some minor experience as a community figure, a quantitative Masters Degree, and over 200,000 words of fictional works published under various pseudonyms across the internet. Beyond that, I've participated in National Novel Writing Month and hit a goal of 50,000 words in a month 5 times -- of questionable quality, but plenty of words.

I'm no stranger to posting writing online - and expecting little notice, little fanfare, and little attention. I'm no stranger to writing a massive amount of stuff. But I lack a particular insight on "news", so providing a "news"letter is a poor use of my time -- and, more crucially, a drain on my energy.

The sum total of my expertise and experience is a rare combination -- and therefore, I should be focusing on all of that.

I went to engineering school, so I sat through intro level courses on innovation and entrepreneurship. Back then, it wasn't relevant to my degree beyond a boost to my GPA, but I took a few important lessons away from it.

1. If you're starting a business, talk to your customers early and often to figure out what they actually want,

2. And if you're not building something they want, Pivot!

That's hard on the internet, when you can't get attention or eyes on your work, but silence, too, is a response.

But the worst thing to do is something you don't enjoy, that no one wants, because you "think it can become something."

So I'm pivoting. To something I want to do, something I believe can add value. And hopefully, I'll know how to recapture that magic in the future.

The Plan

It's quite simple.

I have 27 essay drafts in the idea phase in my notes at the moment.

These essays span the entire breadth of my interests. Finance to fiction. Productivity to pornography. Bureaucracy to beatification.

Every hour I spent on writing a "news"letter was an hour I didn't spend on these essays. Spending time on shallow work instead of deep work on topics that actually mattered to me.

So what's the plan moving forward?

Simple.

Instead of wracking my brains to find clever commentary on the 24/7 news cycle and other people's opinion pieces and sarcastic journalism, I'll put in a snippet of my own works. Things I'd like to work on.

Teasers.

As I process my ideas, I get them done as well.

Teasers

Storied Immortality

The video game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is over a decade old, having first been released in 2011. Like many fantasy games, it has its own made-up pantheon of gods in the Greco-Roman style: deities with clear and defined spheres and overlapping nets of relationships.

But what's less well-known is that many of these gods are actually named after beta-testers of early Elder Scrolls games back in the 1990s: Arena, Daggerfall, Battlespire, and Redguard.

The goddess Mara is named for Marilyn Wasserman -- and is featured in a prominent fetch quest in Skyrim.

The goddess Dibella was named after Mary Jo Dibella -- and is featured in two minor quests in Skyrim.

The god Akatosh is named for Lawrence Szydlowski's forum signature "Also Known As The Old Smaug Himself" -- and was a major part of the climax of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and is mentioned multiple times in the main quest of Skyrim.

This is but one example of many -- not within The Elder Scrolls, but across nerd fandoms.

It used to be that if you wanted your name to echo into eternity, you had to be a great playwright, like William Shakespeare, or an inventor like Thomas Edison, or a terrible dictator like Julius Caesar. Those of us normal people achieved something lesser by being loved by our grandchildren, or being the biggest jerk on the HOA, or climbing the corporate ladder at least in the days when companies still had loyalty. But these days you can be remembered by being on the ground floor of a niche nerd property that explodes two decades later.

I will explore various cases where this has happened, and chart the shape of this immortality.

A "Company" Man

There have been *a lot* of frameworks created over the years to describe companies and capital structure. There's been largely one framework that's used to describe financial options: The Black-Scholes-Merton model. That framework, funnily enough, has been applied to companies as the Merton model.

The Black-Scholes model has been shoehorned into all sorts of places where you wouldn't expect it to be remotely applicable, usually through some clever algebraic manipulations.

A company consists of equity and debt. You can buy either of these, and the rest of this metaphor will take the perspective of someone who's done so. Debt -- loans or bonds -- are obligations: the company is obligated to pay you a agreed-upon amount at agreed-upon times. Equity -- stocks -- have no guarantee of payment, though some companies give residual dividends. Rather, the hope is that the company grows explosively so that some day in the future you can sell your stocks for much more than you paid for.

So whether you want stocks or bonds depends on your personal goals as an investor. But the company doesn't care. In a frictionless world without taxes or bankruptcy or information asymmetry, the company couldn't care less whether it funds itself by selling investors stocks or bonds. But of course we don't live in that world; companies go bankrupt and pay taxes (in theory), and so the choice between selling stocks or issuing bonds matters.

Anyways, I've been thinking about the analogies to personal capital. Everyone has a limited amount of time. As personal finance and productivity gurus will tell you, at a job you trade that time for money. A consistent, limited trade that you more or less agree to upon joining. Debt-like.

Everything else in life... well, is it like stocks? Is it equity? The richness of life can't be fully quantified, even if the money used to buy it can be. There are some similar characteristics: time you spend outside of your job, should you choose well, will reward you with a richness of experience that is unpredictable and unknowable. Or if you're in a startup, more and more wealth.

And of course we don't live in a frictionless world. We live in one with death and taxes and no other certainties. No one sane would see spending their whole life doing their job or spending their whole life doing literally anything else as equivalent.

Which leads me to two questions:

What is the "optimal personal capital structure" for your life?

And can option pricing theory shed any light on that?

Step-Death of the Third Place

Step-sibling pornography has undergone a meteoric rise over the past decade -- disproportionately, given how few people are actually attracted to their step-siblings.

Some of this is the inherent extreme stimulus and taboo of pornography. Yet all narratives, even contrived and thin ones like those in pornography, are either intentional commentaries on the societies they're told in or unwitting reflections of it. And I doubt most pornographers are going out of their way to write deep commentaries on the rise of non-traditional families.

Rather, in further explorations, I will argue, sophistically (in the sense of sophism), that the increase in step-sibling porn and the Death of the Third Place -- a social space other than the home or workplace/school -- are intertwined. I will penetrate how the death of spaces of public intercourse has seduced a generation towards taboo fantasies conceived in the home.

Other stuff I've been up to

1. Played the video game Genome Guardian. Roguelikes are a very curious thing that allow the illusion of effective use of time while being positively Sisyphean.

2. Watched some anime, including the first few moments of a Japanese series known as "Gimai Seikatsu" or "Days with my Step-Sister". Fun fact -- the existence of that show inspired one of the topics in this newsletter!

3. I've been learning how to use the Python package Streamlit, a way to build data visualization dashboards.

And that's all for this week. What have you been up to? What's caught your spirit ablaze? Let me know at netofsociety@gmail.com

Share Net Of Society

Leave a comment

6 days in Greece

Greece is approving a 6 day work week. Here's a Guardian article about it.

Some choice excerpts:

The pro-business government of the prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, says the initiative was made necessary by the twin perils of a shrinking population and shortage of skilled workers.

In an unprecedented exodus, about 500,000 mostly young educated Greeks are estimated to have emigrated since the near decade-long debt crisis erupted in late 2009.

Trialled four-day week programmes have repeatedly shown increased levels of productivity with researchers attributing the outcome to improved levels of focus.

The left-wing opposition has frequently decried “Bulgarian salaries in a country of British prices”, claiming the phenomenon has only exacerbated the brain drain.

The Guardian is British center-left and is clearly implying that a six-day workweek will only make the problem of brain drain worse by making the work culture unbearable. I imagine the mental model here goes something like this: Greece has no opportunities, so the brightest and most ambitious young people are leaving to go somewhere opportunities exist. Adding a constraint that makes it a worse place to live will only accelerate that departure (and generally be an affront to human dignity, but that's often a surprisingly ineffective rhetorical appeal).

You could go with an alternative model, of course: The Greek people don't have enough money. Therefore, giving them a chance to do more work for higher wages would be an effective stimulus.

Greece would hardly be the only place on earth with a more strenuous work culture after this change. Japan's had a pretty rough work culture for a while -- needing to stay late to keep up appearances, needing to go drinking with the boss, being forced out of jobs by being given nonsense assignments instead of just getting fired -- and they're not suffering from brain drain per se. They're just the country that coined the charming word "hikikomori", which describes severe social withdrawal to the point of not leaving home, not going to work or school, and total and utter isolation. Yet different countries have different cultures and standards, and you can't use the development of one as a blueprint of others -- especially not in the case of Japan, which is so exceptional that macroeconomists describe countries as developed, underdeveloped, Japan, and Argentina.

Some people, like investment bankers and entrepreneurs, willingly take on 7 day workweeks, but they do so with promise of extreme reward. The Greek 6-day workweek, in contrast, is targeting sectors like retail - neither the most lucrative nor the most intellectually fulfilling.

This is one experiment I'll be keeping an eye on. Who knows, maybe being forced to work 6 days a week will somehow spark a massive intellectual revolution.

I see in my mind's eye a rag, almost dry, having the very last drops of water being wrung out of it by desperate and whitened hands.

Now imagine using that water to try and put out a burning house.

Blood is thicker than…?

This article here from SFgate has some real fun headline writing:

"Laid-off tech workers advised to sell plasma, personal belongings to survive"

Unfortunately this mostly clickbait even if it's technically true. Because who gave this advice? One of the people profiled for the article, a 55-year-old currently unemployed marketing writer.

Is it good advice?

It's survival advice. It's desperate, last-ditch, end-of-the-line survival advice.

For someone like me, it's advice I hope I never have to follow. And I hope it's the same for you.

I mentioned in a previous post that I was working on a Google Project Management Certificate, generously paid for by my employer. I've added on an IBM Full Stack Software Developer course as well. This might be my greatest flaw. A massive fear of falling behind and then falling into poverty, so instead I try to charge ahead. If I am to be stressed out and terrified, I would rather it be from working too hard to get more than I need early in life when I don't need to than from working too little to get a pittance when I desperately need it.

The advice, verbatim, is as follows:

Set aside your ego and work whatever job will keep you from bleeding dry. Don’t cave into the pressure by signing up for high-volume, low-paying work — it’ll only burn you out. Sell your belongings. Sell your plasma. Whatever it takes to keep money in the bank.

Whatever it takes — but not the high-volume low-paying stuff. Understandable.

Instead, sell what you've accumulated. Your blood. Your lifetime of Stuff. Whatever it takes.

Imagine that hand wringing out the rag again. Be the hands, not the rag.

But metaphorically? You're better off bringing a bucket of water. Or having access to a faucet. Build up your human capital early -- or set up a business that'll be there for you, or make enough early enough that you get at least minimum wage from passive income.

Easier said than done, I know.

Crimes are Bad

Finally, I should be very very clear about this: Stealing is Bad. Committing Fraud is Bad. Many things are Crimes because they are Bad, not Bad because they are Crimes.

You may think I am alluding to certain recent court decisions. I am not, because I am no legal scholar.

Here' an article titled "Gen Zers are so disillusioned with the economy that many think it’s okay to commit fraud"

I'm afraid that once again this is mild clickbait, but the article does in fact deliver. It just doesn't go all that deep into the reasons why. The author, Kris Nagel, is the CEO of Sift -- which describes itself as an "AI-powered fraud platform."

I poked around their website and there's no denying they're legit. They've got 12+ years of AI/ML model tuning on their belt, so they're much more than the latest barrel of scamsters jumping on the LLM hype. They probably have some robust models beneath their belt, whether that's some decision tree or SVM or logistic regression.

This article wasn't written to do a deep sociological analysis of why Gen Z is so disillusioned with the economy that they're turning to fraud. Functionally, it was written to scare internet business owners into thinking that a generation was so willing to commit fraud that anti-fraud SaaS is worth the purchase. There's no real throughline -- just statistic after statistic thrown at the wall, all culminating in a bullet-point-list of "proven approaches" unsupported by earlier rhetoric. Promote flexibility through "low cost monthly subscriptions", the article concludes, while having stated not 5 paragraphs earlier that a $6.99 monthly subscription is really easy to justify stealing. Emphasize authenticity and social responsibility to build a deeper emotional connection to a brand, the article suggests, while also having stated that Gen Z just really doesn't care about these things and that they're able to see past the celebrity premium and halo effect.

Look, I'm not opposed to having good customer service as a policy -- in fact, it's a great way to have and keep customers -- but if the clickbait thesis is that Gen Z is disillusioned with *the economy* to the point of committing fraud, then saying a solution for individual companies is to customers with kid gloves is really, really, really missing the forest for the trees.

Like wringing out a rag to put out a house fire.

And now, the House on Fire

When I decided to write a newsletter, I thought to myself that it would be worth staying positive. I really did. I've been reading lots of self-help and pseudo-spiritual books recently and they all say that if you believe your life is a shitshow and can only ever be a shitshow, then a shitshow it shall remain.

Personally, I think my life - on the micro level - is between fine and great. It will continue to be sustainable. However, I am not blind to the world around me.

What would you do if you were in a rotting, creaking building, the sort of place that could collapse on itself at any minute, but the whole floor is covered in gold. For an extra bit of fun imagine that the building is also on fire, but on the other side from you. Add in any other forms of structural risks you can think of -- the building's due to collapse, but whether from fire, rot, or the unkempt trees looming above you can't say.

You're reasonably sure you can get to the exit from where you are, but there's more gold the closer you get to the fire. What would you do?

I would grab as much gold as I could and keep one eye on the door. An extractive view.

Approaching the burning building extractively has obvious massive risks. Stay too long, and it'll collapse with you inside. In the long run, that is all but inevitable. Even if by some miracle a storm comes and puts the fire out, you'll still be trapped in a decaying husk of a home.

Or maybe you're just insane and the gold is a hallucination, but so is the risk of collapse, and everything is fine and you don't have to scramble to get the fake gold and you won't die. But it feels pretty real in the moment.

Anyways, happy 4th of July to all you Americans out there.

What I've Been Consuming

1. Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. About 70% of the way through. I'm very happy for the author for having achieved inner peace and gotten a good book deal out of it; I'm not familiar enough with the cultures involved to know whether it's orientalist or not. But good for her for having a spiritual journey!

   1. More seriously, the dilettante approach to religion and ritual espoused in the book is surprisingly similar to 1960-1980s hippie magic texts like Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson, but repackaged to be more palatable for an American audience. Entertainment sells an escapist fantasy, and the fantasy here is that the average person -- though this particular story has been more resonant with women given the perspectives -- in an unhappy marriage can break free and embark on a voyage of self-discovery and adventure.

2. AMC has half-off tickets on Tuesdays. This week I watched Kinds of Kindness, by Yorgos Lanthimos, the same director as Poor Things (with a good amount of cast overlap too). I would say it's worth your time if you just want to Watch Art (and I say this with the full implication of Capitalized Common Nouns) and are willing to accept you may leave frustrated or like you've wasted your time.

3. Season 4 of Amazon's The Boys. Catching up on it. It was a lot funnier when it seemed like the bad guys getting away with everything was only pointed satire.

What I've Been Working on.

1. I organized roughly a decade's worth of notes in the Obsidian app, implementing crosslinks and restoring the folder structure left out from back when I was using OneNote as my note-taking app.

2. I've had less creative energy than I'd like because I've been catching up with some old friends.

3. Other than that, I've been rushing through my Coursera courses as fast as I can while still retaining the information within.

That’s all for this week. Please. Leave your thoughts. Please.

Google Certificates: Worth Getting Someone Else to Pay For

I've been taking the Google course for the Project Management Certificate. There's a good bit of overlap with the various self-help books I'm reading -- for example, both emphasize that goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (with some variations for A and R).

The content of the course is, in my opinion, widely applicable to anything definable as a project - artistic, professional, creative, or academic. However, unlike all those other books that promise you frameworks to revolutionize your life or fix your lack of productivity, this comes with a tangible career certificate at the end of it. If you have the choice between reading your 30th self-help book or taking this course, the course will give you a tangible credential and be more usable in interviews or on your resume than "I read a lot of self-help"

A caveat: My firm pays for a selection of Coursera courses, and this is one of them. Thus, I incur no monetary loss by taking this course. Therefore, for me, the only cost is opportunity cost. Buyer beware if that's not the case for you: Coursera charges $49 per month after an initial 7-day free trial, and the course is stated to take up to 6 months to complete, so right around $300 on average. Personally, I've been able to get through about a fifth of it in two days, so it may be possible to finish it in that 7 day free trial, but I doubt you’ll remember much.

If you rush, you’ll get what you pay for: Absolutely nothing.

Headlines that stuck with me

Never Meta Better Customer

If you're a large corporation, you could spend time, money, and effort on customer service. You could spend a significant amount of time training, teaching, and "upskilling" smart and motivated people capable of solving problems dynamically and lose them to more fulfilling professions, or you could go with cheaper workers who might be slightly less effective, or you could outsource to a dirt-cheap country that uses English as a lingua franca and deal with the customer dissatisfaction that entails, justified or otherwise. None of these are ideal.

Or, as Karissa Bell at Engadget reports, you could let them go to small claims court.

Last month, Ray Palena boarded a plane from New Jersey to California to appear in court. He found himself engaged in a legal dispute against one of the largest corporations in the world, and improbably, the venue for their David-versus-Goliath showdown would be San Mateo's small claims court.

...

At the heart of these cases is the fact that Meta lacks the necessary volume of human customer service workers to assist those who lose their accounts. The company’s official help pages steer users who have been hacked toward confusing automated tools that often lead users to dead-end links or emails that don’t work if your account information has been changed. (The company recently launched a $14.99-per-month program, Meta Verified, which grants access to human customer support. Its track record as a means of recovering hacked accounts after the fact has been spotty at best, according to anecdotal descriptions.)

You really have to admire the cojones of underfunding your customer service department and then charging customers a subscription fee to get guaranteed access to that same customer service department. Perhaps the most brazen way to turn a cost center into a revenue generator.

Of the 5 lawsuits described in the piece, the corresponding judgments are around $7000, pending, dismissed, dismissed, and $3500.

While it may seem surprising that Meta would give these small claims cases so much attention, Zucker, the Cal State Northridge professor, says that big companies have their own reasons for wanting to avoid court. “I don’t think places like Google or Meta want to have a bunch of judgments against them … because then that becomes a public record and starts floating around,” he says. “So they do take these things seriously.”

It's quite possible that this is actually the most cost-effective strategy for Meta. A large corporation needs lawyers on hand for compliance, tax, lawsuits with significantly more teeth, so they're a sunk cost. The logic here is "lawyers are expensive, but we're paying them anyways". We have a very small sample size, mind — $10,500 for 5 cases brought to small claims — but that's literally nothing compared to Meta's Market Cap of $1.30 Trillion and 2023 annual revenues of 134 billion. It's a strategy that'll work so long as they keep managing to win.

A tad illogical to assume that this is at all representative, but let's do a back-of-the-envelope for having 24/7 coverage at US minimum wage: $7.25 per hour for 1 whole year is right around $63,000. Facebook has 3 billion active users. Let's say you need 1 customer service rep for every 100,000 users for 30,000 reps. Realistically you'd need more to be realistic, but this is just meant to be representative and also, again, labor in other countries is cheaper. At US minimum wage, that's almost 2 billion dollars (1.89 billion) for reasonably robust customer service. Now if we assume every 5 cases costs right around $10,000, it'd take 189,000 cases (successful or otherwise) to equal the costs of successful customer service.

I am pulling numbers out of the air. Presumably, there is a very well-fed data department at Facebook that has done something similar with real statistics.

Whoever wins, we all lose

A few places have reported that major record labels are suing AI music generators, such as Time Magazine. The RIAA, who in the past have been known for things like suing 12 year olds for using Kazaa (which, I presume, is a long-dead app like Limewire, which itself is like PopcornTime for music, or Spotify for stealing), , is now suing Suno AI and Uncharted Labs Inc. for $150,000 per song used in their training data.

I'm not a lawyer, but I would put money on the resemblance of the musical output to existing songs and the indistinguishability of generated vocals from famous artists being a pivotal point in the arguments, much like OpenAI's Sam voice resembling Scarlett Johansson.

In Monday’s lawsuits, the RIAA claims authentic producer tags appear on some of the music coming out of Suno and Udio, and that people who use the services have generated sounds very similar to numerous artist-made songs, including The Temptations’ My Girl, Green Day’s American Idiot and Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas. They have also produced vocals that are indistinguishable from famous recording artists, including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson, according to the RIAA.

Unsurprisingly, I don't think I've seen a lot of people cheering on the RIAA just yet. Suing teenagers for thousands of dollars over music piracy is what many people would call an *overreaction*; after years decrying copyright law enforcement we have come to the telos. Copyright law originally was indeed intended to protect the intellectual property of creators — to enable a world where the originators of an idea could make a living off of them — no matter how twisted the enforcement may have become, and now it seems we're nearing a time where that original purpose rears its head once more.

There's merit to the fear surrounding AI generated content -- being able to generate almost anything at will for whatever reason is almost certainly going to hurt the artistically inclined, yet perhaps I'm coming at this from a perspective of creative chauvinism. Is the person who makes a cover of a Beatles song to sell potato chips or a diagram in that floppy soulless corporate artstyle *really* being artistically fulfilled by their career?

Katharina Brenner, CC BY SA 4.0

That's the extent of my chauvinism. I digress. The harm is likely to be the same as in other sectors, like banking or accounting or finance — yes, seriously. If you replace all the 10-hour grunt work usually given to some fresh faced college graduate with a senior associate with an AI for 2 hours, where is your next generation of seniors going to come from? The same applies to the recording artist. We might end up in a world where only the rich can afford to make a living off of art — but then, what else is new?

I wish I could write headlines this good.

Michael Atleson at the Federal Trade Commission clearly had a lot of fun coming up with the title "Succor Borne every minute".

The article itself boils down to "do not lie about AI and don't use AI to lie."

• Don't misrepresent what these services are or can do. Your therapy bots aren’t licensed psychologists, your AI girlfriends are neither girls nor friends, your griefbots have no soul, and your AI copilots are not gods.

• Don’t use consumer relationships with avatars and bots for commercial manipulation. ... Consistent with the FTC’s rulemaking proposal to make it easier for people to “click to cancel” subscriptions, a bot shouldn’t plead, like Hal 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, not to be turned off.

It is very amusing, or depressing, that an official US government website states "your AI girlfriends are neither girls nor friends".

What I've been reading:

I finished The 12 Week Year. I've already in part started to implement it anyways. A task expands to fill the time allotted to it; deadlines drive you forward.

Started The Practice: Shipping Creative Work by Seth Godin. It inspired me to stick to this habit, and also pushed me to some off-cycle emails.

Watched the anime "Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury". I enjoyed it but it’s not going to be something that sticks with me forever. It’s a fun story; people on the internet seem to think it’s not quite as deep as previous entries to the series.

What I've been working on:

I've started laying my fanfiction to rest: I will probably never return to some of these stories, but they contain a large amount of buildup without any payoff. The least I can do for my readers is provide a summary of what-could-have-been.

I work a job that's a "spreadsheet job". Much of what I do consists of moving values from one spreadsheet to another, or checking a spreadsheet and making sure it's "right".

It's boring work. I am, for the time being, fine with this. Not because I have grand ambitions of being a spreadsheet worker or spreadsheet process designer for the rest of my life, but because it pays a good wage and it gives me enough time for other pursuits.

Still, I fundamentally believe that I'm *lazy*. And if there's one thing that annoys me, it's tedium.

There's a saying in software development: Why spend 6 minutes doing a simple task when you could spend 6 hours failing to automate it?

It didn't take 6 hours, but that's what I've done. Written Excel Macros (our development environment is largely locked down, so no easy Python) to automate the task of updating dates by 1 day or dragging and dropping formulas. 30 seconds of tedium daily replaced with 10 seconds of daily excessive self-satisfaction at using my overwrought solution.

Frankly, it's worth it. In a year, those saved 20 seconds will add up to a whole 84 minutes. Wow. So much. But the real benefit is that every morning I won't wake up knowing I'll have to do something mind-numbingly tedious and prone to human error, but instead I'll greet a small, tangible reminder of my capacity for innovation.

Offbeat News

Bilt pays the Bills

Normally, if you pay rent using a credit card, you have to pay a 2-3% fee. This is offset somewhat by getting rewards points, but at 1-2% for general purchases, that rarely beats the 2-3% you're paying ahead of time. Your net return ends up somewhere around zero.

The fintech startup Bilt offers a credit card in partnership with Wells Fargo that gives renters a way around this. Bilt lets you pay your rent without incurring this fee, because Wells Fargo will pay it instead. Renters get reward points for this at 1%. That's $20 on $2000 rent. An extra $240 a year, which could pay for say a week or two of groceries. Not much, but far from nothing.

The Wall Street Journal says Wells Fargo made the following assumptions:

65% of card volume would be non-rent, and vendors would pay fees on this volume.

50%-75% of charges to the card would not be paid off month to month, generating interest.

Can you guess where this is going?

The opposite occurred. Many customers used the card *primarily* for rent, and paid off their balances within days of incurring them.

Wells Fargo bet on their customers being bad with money, but instead they attracted people who saw this as a free money glitch. For the strategy to work as intended, they'd have to offer it to people with *worse* credit -- and that raises the risk of them not being able to pay.

The worst case scenario is that Wells Fargo, desperate to make better use of the partnership, offers the card to people who use it to pay their rent and then make only the minimum payments, racking up a balance right up until they declare bankruptcy. The landlord gets paid, the renter gets a place to stay, and Wells Fargo, a bank with no small amount of fraud scandals in its past, ends up on the hook.

Bloomberg's Matt Levine breaks down the economics better than I could, if you're subscribed to Money Stuff.

Going for Broke(r fees)

I came across this article about New York City broker fees by Slate's Alexander Sammon.

In short, the New York real estate market has something called a broker fee. Essentially, a landlord hires a broker to fill a vacant rental. The broker unlocks the apartment and gives you the lease, and then you pay them. The fee is 10-15% of annual rent. For a $2000/month apartment, that's $2400-$3600, to someone you didn't hire, who may or may not have provided a substantial service. It's rent-seeking.

A friend of mine back in college was actually building a startup to let people rent apartments without paying said fee, but I haven't heard much about his progress on it. I hope it won't be necessary soon.

To be clear, I agree with the sentiments expressed by the piece: I don't think there's any world where people want to give thousands of dollars to people who did so little work. But as a piece of journalism, it's so biased it's downright artistic.

A few choice lines:

“There will be more,” broker Graig Linn assured me, venti iced Starbucks coffee in hand. “It’s 9 a.m. That’s tough for brokers.”

The article opens by stating that 9 a.m. is "tough". Will get sympathy from almost no one in the corporate world, whose jobs often *start* at 9 a.m., corporate or otherwise, and whose days therefore must start even earlier.

The Real Estate Board of New York and the New York State Association of Realtors issued a call to arms, and the industry folk came in crowds, young and handsome and coiffed, wearing their fair share of gingham. There were lots of high heels for a street protest, and suspiciously few forehead wrinkles. There were signs. “This bill will kill my livelihood!” read one, the lettering in all caps. “Agents are tenants too,” read another.

A description that creates the impression of privilege. These are young, hot, and rich people protesting. The rhetoric of class warfare is deployed by the protestors, yet the article stresses that they may as well be the rich oppressor.

“I’ve been here fighting for reproductive rights,” yelled one broker, “but I never thought I would stand here today to demand the City Council stop the highest rent increase in history!” “No!” yelled someone else. I asked multiple attendees if, given the concern for high rents, they had attended or organized any other protests for affordable housing. I was told to reach out to the brokerage firms, or REBNY, the lobbying group, for better and more accurate answers on that particular question.

Constructing the hypocrisy. By explicitly tying this back to the corporate overlords and the lobbying group, the article hammers in how this is, by definition, an astroturfed protest, though primarily a self-serving one.

Danich was joined by three women, former co-workers. “I was surprised, yeah, by how many people there were over there,” he said, of the protests on the opposing side.

“Most of the people there are paid; they’re being paid to be there,” one of his colleagues assured me. “Just like with congestion pricing.”

I turned to look over my shoulder to see if I could spot any alleged paid protesters, skeptical that one would have to pay New Yorkers to dislike being charged thousands of dollars for a service they didn’t want or need or hire for.

And finally, at the end, one last nail to hammer in the point of how out-of-touch this protest is. The surprise that people don't want to pay money is the cherry on top.

I'd recommend a read of the full article. The article is entertainingly biased, but it also lays out facts about rent, broker fees, and cost of living.

While I am sympathetic to the people who can no longer continue in their chosen field of employment, ultimately, it pays to diversify your skillsets and keep on learning. Threats to employment can come from anywhere. You never want to be caught on the back foot, and you can do that by expanding your skillset in as many ways as possible. No easy source of money lasts forever.

Mysteries of the Epigenome

As part of "The big idea" series, the Guardian published this piece on epigenetics by Dr Hannah Critchlow. Essentially, epigenetics is the study of how experiences in the lifetime of a parent can cause changes in genetic code that gets passed onto children. Examples given include starvation during World War II or trauma inflicted upon refugees, shaping the behavior of their children and grandchildren. It's worth a read on its own; I don't raise this from a scientific viewpoint.

What interests us here at Net Of Society is the interplay between science and fiction.

A lot of sci-fi from the past century assumed that Genetics alone had a lot of explanatory power. Franklin, Watson, and Crick discovered the structure of DNA in 1953, and by 1963 we had the X-Men and by 1965 we had Frank Herbert's Dune. Both of these hinge of some magical and ineffable property of genetics granting supernatural abilities. And both of these were relegated firmly to the realm of fiction as further scientific discoveries were made.

But epigenetics, while still very far from Dune's "genetic memory" (in a nutshell, those with genetic memory can perfectly recall all the experiences of their ancestors, at least up to the moment of their conception though even that might not be a full limitation), is reminiscent of it; the idea that the experiences of the parents influence the child has forever fascinated humanity - "I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me," for example - but this time, there's science to support it.

Any new field of science - AI, genetics, nuclear energy - is rich fodder for the imagination. I expect epigenetics to be the same. Science fiction is said not to predict the future, but to extend the anxieties of the modern day, and in a world where the masses are reluctant to have kids and the children of the elite bask in their advantages, there are plentiful metaphors to be spun.

A few other articles that might be worth your time:

I don't have anything snappy to say about these, but they're worth your time to read and understand.

Anti-Avocado Militias, from The Guardian

Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy wants a warning on social media about youth mental health

What I've been reading/enjoying

Not too much. Still on that self-help kick.

• I've finished Someday is Today by Matthew Dicks and transcribed the exercises within for my own use.

• Also started reading The 12 Week Year by Brian P Moran and Michael Lennington, and The Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco.

  • I've read enough self-help at this point (at least 5 books total) to start seeing trends. These books invoke *a lot* of personal anecdote to buttress tactics that, in large part, are common sense that no one wants to hear. That doesn't mean they're wrong-headed or that I disagree with the concept of self-help, but even after just two weeks I've learned that words without action is empty.

• I binged six episodes of the anime "I'm in Love with the Villainess". I enjoyed the manga, but I feel I'm not part of the target audience for the anime. I couldn't tell you whether it was a matter of pacing or voice acting or humor. I think part of it is how the entirety of the worldbuilding exists in a juxtaposition of video-game-mechanic and actual-world-the-protagonist-lives-in solely to facilitate the core romance, like many works in the genre. But since the romance and character dynamics are the *point*, the world can be a secondary consideration.

  • Or maybe I couldn't get past the ethics of romantically pursuing someone you know primarily as a video game character.

What I've been working on:

• I hesitate to share this too widely, but I have a fair bit of fiction out on the internet under various pseudonyms. On Archive Of Our Own (AO3), a fanfiction site, I've received messages telling me about YouTube accounts that do readings of my fanfiction, and which encourage me to file DMCA Complaints via YouTube. I suppose I have the right to, but it surprises me. I didn't expect to make any money from this because frankly the economics of profiting from free content on the internet is terrible. Second-order profit seems even less likely.

• I've started outlining a novel. I've done NanoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) a few times before, but this will be the first time in a long while I'll be doing so off-season. This novel will be loosely based on relationship drama that happened to a friend of mine.

• I've started outlining a game modification (mod) for the video game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. I have no experience with game development, so it'll likely be a very long time before I make substantial progress. My goal is to either have a first build out by September or definitively shelve it by then.

What are you working on? I'd love to hear about it. Feel free to contact me with any thoughts at NetOfSociety@gmail.com

Reddit Army, Robot Army

My algorithmic google news feed has introduced me to a strange and bizarre genre of internet content: screenshots of Reddit posts from real-life drama subs, interspersed with ads. These pages consist of the main post with some eye-catching headline like "Reddit, am I the asshole for bleaching my neighbor's dog?", an advertisement, the text of the post itself (giving crucial details, e.g. "the dog is a pitbull and the bleach was the only thing I had on hand to defend myself), an advertisement, and finally the chorus of redditor responses providing validation from the masses with helpful inputs, often nonsequiturs, like "NTA (reddit for 'not the asshole'). Pitbulls are monsters that deserve to be put down," with an advertisement between each one.

These have a visceral caveman appeal, like gossip or I imagine reality TV: the knowledge that some people's lives are worse than yours, and the simple bloodlust of the internet crowd.

As a business model, it's ingenious. These sites rely on taking the content put onto the internet for free by strangers -- frankly, many of these stories are outrageous enough to be fiction, and five years ago the Average Redditor would've assumed that was the case -- and reposting it with advertisements. Minimal overhead for what I assume is ultimately somewhat pathetic profit.

Anyways, the reason this comes to mind is that recently, as has been going across the internet, Google introduced AI-generated information panels to their search function. These AI search helpers have been useless or worse. Notoriously, it told people to add Elmer's glue to pizza to make it stickier.

Anyways, EFF lawyer Kurt Opsahl determined that the source for this fun fact was actually the Redditor f*cksmith, 11 years ago.

I'm not saying we should be worried, but Reddit recently announced a deal to license its data to OpenAI. Clearly, everyone and their mother has been mining its content already to feed into the grand mathematical matrices that make LLMs. And yet, as has been reiterated time and time again, the internet is full of lies. People on Reddit have been conditioned for years to lie and exaggerate in the name of gaining imaginary internet points -- "karma". The amount of lies that abound on Reddit show that many humans are natural born storytellers -- and yet, they're not the ones seeing a cent of profit from it. If you like telling stories on the internet, why not try to go professional?

Anyways, some more cheerful things to think about:

Who needs metal limbs when you have plastic...?

Scientists found microplastics in all tested semen samples in China and Italy .

I'm not a biologist. The science isn't settled. But we know that some plastics -- think BPA -- are endocrine disruptors, and it took years for the science to settle around asbestos and cigarettes. If I'm being optimistic, humanity survived cigarettes and radium watches and mercury thermometers and arsenic wallpaper. And if you donate blood you can reduce the forever chemicals in your bloodstream.

A different poison. But there probably are ways around it. Even if there are thorny ethical issues around donating your own poisoned blood to someone who's already sick.

Congestion

New York State was about to roll out a new congestion pricing regime in Manhattan, but Governor Hochul changed her mind after visiting three diners .

In addition to citing business owners’ rising levels of anxiety, the governor said she had met some who told her that their customers had driven from New Jersey to patronize their favorite diners, and had not heard customers mention they supported congestion pricing.

New York City's in an interesting place because, like all cities, it's filled with people who don't live there who would benefit a lot less than people who *do* live their from infrastructure improvements. The New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority, furthermore, serves exclusively the *city* of New York while being under the authority of the state. There are some misaligned incentives for sure -- the infrastructure improvements brought about by the congestion tax would serve primarily the residents of the city who rely on public transit by charging the outsiders who don't, all under the authority of Albany some 150 miles north.

"I encourage you to go to the next diner with me and ... sit with me and watch the people come over and thank me," the governor said. "That's all I need to know. That is all I need to know."

It's a very salt-of-the-earth justification. It's an argument from the heart for a decision doubtless grounded in shrewd politicking.

Fond Farewells

Going Concern reports the following "voluntary separation" letter from PricewaterhouseCoopers UK was leaked to the Financial Times:

“Should you decide to accept this voluntary offer, it is possible for you to send out a note to a defined group, however this must not refer to the voluntary severance offer or the circumstances of leaving (suggested wording for this note is given below but we recognise that you will naturally want to personalise this).”

To ensure departing staff color within the lines on their goodbye notes, the firm insisted any communications “not be derogatory to PwC or its employees/partners” and provided this template:

“The content of your comms should follow this approach . . . ‘Following recent discussions with my [relationship leader], I have taken the decision to leave PwC. It hasn’t been an easy decision for me to reach but now that I have, I am excited about what the future holds for me and the new opportunities on the horizon. I have really enjoyed my time at PwC and the opportunity to work with such talented colleagues.’”

Look, I get it. You might really hate your job, but it's just a bad idea for your last email to a company to be filled with vitriol. Never burn bridges. If you want to "be derogatory", that's the kind of talk you save for the watercooler, not your goodbye email.

I went to a pool party with some of my ex-colleagues from different Big 4 firm just the other weekend. We definitely talked about what we really thought about our jobs. (We hated it).

Honestly, this letter seems like something put in place because someone decided to use their goodbye email blast to do exactly what it says not to do. And sure, maybe you should have the freedom to do that. But a snide and sarcastic callout email, if received without the context of lived experience, doesn't work. If you say that your boss is a crazy irrational hardass and they say you're a spiteful underperforming unprofessional lunatic, the fact that you made your last communication a shittalking email is going to lend aid to their side of the story.

In consulting and auditing, even if you hated your boss, you might be able to get money from them some years down the line. It's just not in your self interest to slam that door closed with a catty goodbye email.

Positivity

Finally, to end this on a positive note, the *Wall Street Journal*'s Rachel Feintzig draws on the work of Stanford Psychologist Jamil Zaki and argues that cynicism at work has gotten real bad. Real, real bad, to the point where nobody trusts anyone anymore.

Betrayed once, we practice what Zaki calls "pre-disappointment." always assuming others will let us down. The mindset feels productive and cunning, like we'll be able to protect ourselves. But Zaki says it can actually stunt our careers in the long run, and hurt our mental and physical health... "Cynics tell a story full of villains and end up living it"

Feintzig acknowledges that yes, the widening gap between executive and worker pay firmly entrench company loyalty as a thing of the past, but rejecting cynicism will help you enjoy the workplace more and be successful in the corporate world.

It's a useful mindset to have for anyone who lives and breathes the corporate world. The worst thing you can do to yourself is intentionally choose to live a life full of cynicism and despair because you feel like you have to.

But maybe there's an unspoken option. Maybe succeeding in the corporate world requires cynicism arising from realism, because of how corporate mandates often misalign with individual morals, or optimistic and willful naivete. Maybe it's natural to distrust your CEO who makes 200 times your pay, and maybe being okay with making 200 times your worker's pay requires a certian degree of intentionality. To reject the first is to embrace the second and perform the role without thought for the implications.

Instead of trying to be an optimist in a cynical structure, why not leave that structure entirely?

What I've been reading:

Someday is Today by Matthew Dicks. Inspired me to write this, actually.

The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightingale. Says a lot about the power of positive thinking and goal-setting as incredibly powerful tools. I've gotten a handle on the second. I'm working towards the first.

The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. If there's one piece of advice I'm taking away from this, it's "buy good companies for less than they're worth"

What are you reading? What interesting news tidbits have lasted longer than they should've in your mind?

That's all for this week. See you next.