Affluent Material Poverty
As I like to brag, I’ve been to 96 of the largest 125 cities in America. Now that I think of it, I can add Ann Arbor and Flint which are new to me. This year had me see a lot of new places, including much of South Dakota, north Georgia, rural Maryland and Cambridge University across the pond. Funny that I have given up my mini-quests to do some affluent luxuries. I didn’t quite realize how much of a Porsche snob I have become until I had to explain several times to friends how I decided not to do that but practice piano instead. Not that I’ve practiced much since September. In either case, I’ve pretty much stopped watching car stuff on YouTube, or dreaming about Bora Bora.
What happened on the Bora score was I watched this video about one of the world’s most exclusive island resorts called The Brando, named after Marlon, of course. As you might have imagined, some affluent dork with a camera, or some rich putz who hired a dork with a camera walked around the joint narrating. Because we’re all captivated by narratives, right? That reminds me to start reading Nabokov again, I’m a bit weary of stories with horses and tumbleweeds. At any rate the Brando Narrative reminded me of how dependent one makes oneself in resorts, especially those on exclusive private islands. Of course our narrating weenie kept glorifying the indigenous maids and chauffeurs as they cosplayed their own ancestral ghosts and played midget guitars and danced in short skirts. Whoo. Authentic. Now could you run and get me an Aperol Spritzer? I tip. The same dynamic runs through a guantlet of affluent behaviors. It’s easy to get a good plumber these days, but have you seen the reviews on Yelp recently? Karen Central. These are the sorts of things I don’t want to be thankful for, and I’m not.
I realized several years ago that I, like my fellow affluent wankers, am something of a tasteless collector. It’s easy to determine if and only if you have tried to have a profitable garage sale. Thank god for that free market. Your test goes a bit beyond that. If the joy of acquisition is primarily in the excitement of unboxing and it goes downhill from there, you too might be an upper middle class dipstick. This is especially the case for sports and exercise equipment if after two years you are back roughly at the skill level you were at the day of purchase. I do have seventeen watches and the marginal utility of the next has rapidly approached zero. The plurality of them sit, like my entire collection of designer ties, in tidy but dusty containers. But I’m shamelessly a watch guy, and it’s not a guilty pleasure. I am proud of all of my functional mechanical possessions. They help me be the me I wish to be. The Boy Scout. Prepared. Never surprised. Never without the proper toolkit. However, I do think my record collection and my library of hardbound and virtual books are admirable.
In truth, I dress for every occasion, and I have just enough clothes to do so. Dressing up keeps me from opening my mouth or going out of my lane. I do have clothes for being gabby however. Most of the time I want my clothing to say a lot about me.
Small Talk
There may seem to be nothing interesting in all of this studious navel gazing, but this is the time of year for all of that, and one thing I have recognized with a bit of chagrin is that there is a time and a place for small talk. It’s necessary. We could conceivably bottom line everything and remind everyone that if you don’t have your health, you have nothing. Or is it, that if you have your health, you have everything? Or perhaps that is just a conversation we only have with God. I’m perfectly obnoxious and comfortable talking about my diabetic neuropathy and the various gadgets, dietary discipline and exercise regimen I apply to my own funky self. When I was younger and wore the Michael Jordan head, I used to be on the jealous lookout for dudes shinier than me. Now I know people grieving the loss of their parents, the illness of their children, the upcoming surgery for themselves, the death of a long time acquaintance. I kind of want to be the sort one would confide in such that I may dispense stoic advice and realism. But then, yeah, I kinda don’t. So small talk. Small talk over ice cream.
At the same time I also aim to project the sort of uncommon wisdom that stops a thief with a knife. I just heard a story about such a one-eyed character who fooled Olaf Tryggvason, the King of Norway and quite possibly the greatest Viking of all time, into believing that he was speaking Odin in the form of a one-eyed greybeard. God-wise. Captivating narration.
My sister convinced me that I should put together a timeline for all of those 96 places. When was I there? What did I do? How did the place impress me? But I have always been in fragments, that same stoic self. I fall into alien observation mode and I analyze the curious behaviors of people whose motivations and actions are opaque and strange. What I have learned was to seek nothing outside of myself. Or as Cobb’s Rule 24 and 25 state:
Only be a fan of the dead.
You ultimately get the audience you deserve.
These two in combination helped me from climbing up somebody else’s legs and onto their back bragging about the view from above their head. What did I do? I was perceptive and articulate. I wrote a lot of all this down. I’ll never put it all together, but it’s a good idea to try. I think maybe this is something I would want AI to do for me.
Small talk is helping me. I’m good in one on one. I’m good presenting to an audience when I’m the only one speaking. I’m improving the ability to moderate myself in small groups, not necessarily working the room, not necessarily in alien observation mode.
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Regret
My cousin Sam asked if I had any regrets. I tried deeply to find them. I remember only my existential partners, men I might have been had I taken the turns they took. So I could give them the respect I might expect myself because there, for the flap of a butterfly wing, I would be. And then someone told me the tale of the infinite reincarnation - did I write that? DuckDuckGo can’t find it. The moral of that story is that the meaning of life is to learn to love and respect yourself, but people only learn that through a forgetful reincarnation of being every human; you remember after death.
I’m thankful for being able to see myself all over the place in different contexts and these places and people give me an infinite variety of human stories, which is a blessing when one is well-suited to admire. So I didn’t have any regrets to share - every pain I survived means the pain worked and forced me into a new path with less, or conditioned me to endure more. Whatever. Pain is not ‘weakness exiting the body’ because human strength lives in Mediocristan. Nobody survives 50 years of solitary confinement or 50Gs or instantaneous deceleration.
I am pleased that the lessons of the above video have become common sense to me. It is a pleasure to be approximately correct about the dozen or things I actually care about and very satisfying to live life within those limits. Like any painting, we are not meant for an infinite canvas.
The American Context
In the past two months, two people have told me I am their hero. It’s a bit much to take. One needs to take one’s humility seriously without evading responsibility. So my responsibility is to share what I have learned that one might consider heroic and share it.
What I learned in stopping living for the dosh point was that I am incapable of moving markets in directions favorable to my skillset. I can only apply myself in service and take advantage of opportunities that present themselves, understanding that failure is always possible. I watched Ridley Scott’s Napoleon and a few other shows on him, and I learned of his manipulation of his image through the commission of artists and scholars. It’s not about me. I don’t promise often. I commit to a way of life that is fulfilling and spares me time and resources for loving efforts on behalf of others. I live on in these ‘heroics’, but they come from inspiration easily found in the rest of the world and in history.
I recall the analogy I made to access to the world’s greatest music of the late 19th century. If you lived in Oklahoma you would have no access and might not even believe such excellence even existed. You couldn’t crawl the web, but maybe you could catch a train back to Boston. What do we miss in our pursuit of American dosh? We don’t possess enough different currencies to move freely and we start to wonder what we’re missing. We are losing out on everything else, much of which is edifying. So go to South Dakota and be yourself, with hiking shoes. Try not to be a dipstick. The important thing about the American context is that so much of our society emphasizes what The Brando promises and we’re all downscale of that pretending that we struggle. We only struggle with the dials on our air-conditioners but are we being heroic? Are we even trying?
I highlight historical warriors today in recognition that my battles are small, and I have that to be thankful for. If you aim ambitiously you should endeavor in all things to conserve the quality and longevity of those lives over which you are responsible. Very little else matters in comparison.
Sorry to hear that you're dealing with diabetic neuropathy. That's a bullet I'm thankful to have dodged in this last quarter-century that I've been rassling with the Diabeetus.
On the other hand, it's humbling to find out that you're somebody's hero, if only for one aspect of your life. Enjoy the egoboo, for what it's worth.
An aggregator pointed me to this article at Hedgehog Review about ethicist Derek Parfit, titled Nothing Personal. The first paragraph is outrageous — but don't give up. And when done reading the article, have a try at reading Parfit's major opus, Reasons and Persons, on Kindle's sample. Compelling!