Today's post offers thoughts I've gathered over the past several years on why it's never worth it to explain yourself.
I'll start with a premise. When asking you for an explanation, the vast majority of people are not seeking to learn, they are seeking to argue.
While that statement isn't always true, it's true a lot more than I'd like it to be. So, with my typical window-licking slowness, I have finally learned to tread carefully when asked questions like:
Why do you live in a small home?
Why do you drive an old car?
Why do you (or don't you) eat X? (meat, grains, carbs, lentils!, etc.)
Why do you practice X? (Stoicism, frugality, anticonsumerism, etc.)
Why in the world would you do intermittent fasting?
...and so on, just smile, nod, and deflect the question. Don't explain yourself.
I'm not quite saying you should never, ever, ever explain yourself when asked. What I am saying is, before explaining, it's worth it to assess:
* Is the person merely affecting to be curious, while not being genuinely curious at all?
* Is the questioner engaging in Sealioning: asking for citations, studies, and evidence (e.g: "Where are the evidence-based scientific studies supporting intermittent fasting? Links?") when no amount citations or evidence will actually convince them?
* Is the person asking questions as a device to then tell you exactly why you're wrong?
* Is the person unable to comprehend your discussion of the domain because you practice it at an extremely advanced level? Imagine if a consumerist person who's never tried to save money came into contact with the concept of extreme savings (savings rates of 50%, 75% or higher). They'd view the idea as impossible, ludicrous even. Likewise, a person who "knows" they need to eat every 2-3 hours would consider a discussion of intermittent fasting to be insane, unworthy of comprehension. When a subject domain doesn't exist in someone's Overton Window [1] you ruin their chances of ever learning about it by explaining too much too soon. Their minds cannot (yet) make the leap.
Worst of all: in each these instances, any sincere effort to explain and answer questions merely increases your doubt in yourself about something you've already decided is important to you! Again: smile, nod... and deflect the question.
Remember the saying Never complain, never explain. And this goes double for all online discussions: If you're explaining online, you're losing. You're wasting pixels (and undoubtedly failing to convince a random person online who was never likely to be convinced in the first place) when instead you should just get back to doing the very things that make you successful.
You have no obligation or responsibility to explain your pursuits to others. None.
READ NEXT: Running Towards Humps
AND: Why Can't I Find People Who Share My Values on Anti-Consumerism and Frugality?
Warning: Do not read this footnote unless you are a geek:
[1] The Overton Window concept is helpful in understanding societal changes in all sorts of domains: historical, social, political, cultural, military, and more. In geopolitics or history, examples of "outside-the-Overton Window" situations might be things like the idea of being against the Vietnam War in, say, 1963, or wanting to go to war against the Nazis in 1936 during the peak of the appeasement era. These ideas, at those times, were too radical for people to handle.
A cultural example of an Overton Window might be something like having an openly gay character in a TV show or movie in the late 1950s, something which (again, at that time) was well beyond our culture's ability to accept. In other words, when something is outside of a people's Overton Window, it simply doesn't exist as an element of open public discourse.
Note also that Overton Windows don't care about ethics or morality, they just are where they are. In 1936, an appeasement strategy with Nazi Germany was entirely inside our cultural Overton Window, even though in retrospect this consensus opinion turned out to be horrifically, tragically wrong. And today, sadly, our collective Overton Window includes wide acceptance of lamentable practices like Twitter mobs doxxing and threatening high school students based on a snap interpretation of a partial video clip.
It's fascinating to think about how our culture changes over time, how we collectively grow to accept or reject certain cultural norms, and what drives these changing norms. What's even more useful and interesting, however, is to think about where our collective Overton Window is going to move next.
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
Tuesday, January 29, 2019
Tuesday, January 22, 2019
Not Listening
"Most of my adult life I have not been listening fully. I only listened long enough to determine whether the speaker's ideas matched my own. If they didn't, I would stop listening, and my mind would race ahead to compose an argument against what I believed the speaker's idea or position to be."
--John Francis, environmentalist, and author of Planetwalker: 22 Years of Walking. 17 Years of Silence
We all do this. All of us. And if you believe you don't, you're lying to yourself.[1]It's refreshing that Mr. Francis has both the perspicacity to notice and the ego strength to own up to this common, common habit. I'm guessing it has something to do with his predilection for silence.[2]
Today is the ultimate era of not listening. We're convinced we are right... and all those other mentally ill idiots are wrong. Convinced.
The closest we come to listening these days, it seems, is aping the behavior of a listener. Except that our brains are still actively composing a response argument.
In other words, not listening at all. But at least looking good while doing it.
Do we just have a permanent disease of not listening? Is it terminal? Is it a feature, not a bug, of the human condition? It really makes me wonder.
And it makes me wonder about my own words: What is the purpose of the words I write at Casual Kitchen and elsewhere, what good do they do? Are they valuable, or are they just a pixelated version of "not listening"? Would it be better just to shut up and just… listen?
[1] If you still believe you don't do this, perform this simple test: Take the single political position you believe in most strongly. Find someone who holds the opposite position, and ask him or her to articulate why they're right and your position is wrong. Observe yourself during this conversation. Yep... you do it.
[2] A gem from the Wikipedia page on John Francis: "On his birthday in 1973, Francis decided to stop speaking as a gift to his community, to not argue for one day and instead listen to what others had to say. He found this so valuable that he continued to be silent the next day. This continued and he ended up not speaking for 17 years, with the exception of a phone call to his mother after 10 years of silence."
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
--John Francis, environmentalist, and author of Planetwalker: 22 Years of Walking. 17 Years of Silence
We all do this. All of us. And if you believe you don't, you're lying to yourself.[1]It's refreshing that Mr. Francis has both the perspicacity to notice and the ego strength to own up to this common, common habit. I'm guessing it has something to do with his predilection for silence.[2]
Today is the ultimate era of not listening. We're convinced we are right... and all those other mentally ill idiots are wrong. Convinced.
The closest we come to listening these days, it seems, is aping the behavior of a listener. Except that our brains are still actively composing a response argument.
In other words, not listening at all. But at least looking good while doing it.
Do we just have a permanent disease of not listening? Is it terminal? Is it a feature, not a bug, of the human condition? It really makes me wonder.
And it makes me wonder about my own words: What is the purpose of the words I write at Casual Kitchen and elsewhere, what good do they do? Are they valuable, or are they just a pixelated version of "not listening"? Would it be better just to shut up and just… listen?
[1] If you still believe you don't do this, perform this simple test: Take the single political position you believe in most strongly. Find someone who holds the opposite position, and ask him or her to articulate why they're right and your position is wrong. Observe yourself during this conversation. Yep... you do it.
[2] A gem from the Wikipedia page on John Francis: "On his birthday in 1973, Francis decided to stop speaking as a gift to his community, to not argue for one day and instead listen to what others had to say. He found this so valuable that he continued to be silent the next day. This continued and he ended up not speaking for 17 years, with the exception of a phone call to his mother after 10 years of silence."
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
Tuesday, January 15, 2019
Status Signals All the Way Down
At every socioeconomic level there are choices set out for us.
At lower income or entry-level socioeconomic tiers there are choices like these:
Should I buy Tide detergent? Or should I buy All at a 40% lower price point?
Should I buy regular chicken or pay double for organic, free-range, cruelty-free chicken?
As you work your way up the socioeconomic ladder, the questions change shape a little bit:
Should I buy another Honda Civic, or am I ready to step up to a BMW? Or am I the kind of distinctive person who drives an Audi, or a Jaguar?
At still higher socioeconomic levels you can ask yourself things like:
Should I live in Summit, NJ or am really a Basking Ridge kind of person?
Should I send my child to private school? Should I consider Hotchkiss or Choate?
Should I consider the Rolex? Or am I ready for the Patek Philippe?
No matter how high you go, these aspirational questions never end.
Should buy a pied-à-terre in SoHo, or on the Upper East Side?
Should I winter in Miami? Or Turks and Caicos? Or Buenos Aires? After all I'm quite an international person.
It shouldn't surprise us to find aspirational tiers for megayachts, private jets and major professional sports teams. Remember: billionaires like Larry Ellison and Paul Allen are status-signalling primates too.
As you read though this post, it’s entirely possible that these choices quickly begin to sound ridiculous to a person who happens to be far removed, socioeconomically speaking, from the upper tiers.
Then again: do you think a wealthy person cares about the type of detergent they buy? These "games" appear ridiculous from both angles.
And yet people still believe they need to make whatever choices there are at their level. And, worse, as we move up the ladder (if we are fortunate enough to do so), we effortlessly start to make decisions that used to seem ridiculous, but somehow don't any more because our brains adjust so easily to new levels of wealth, comfort and status.
Now, if you play the money game right and save and invest properly over the course of your life, rest assured: you will be facing decisions at tiers far above where you are now.
The question is, will you make these decisions from a place of self-awareness? Will you understand the greater game being played around you that structures these endless signals, these endless aspirational products? Or will you be a checkers player, obediently and enthusiastically choosing the Patek Philippe watch when it's your turn to do so?
Eventually, if you’re lucky, you’ll recognize that a system has set out the frame, the structure, of these choices across your whole life. This system "allows" you to make a series of choices from a series of pre-set menus.
Once you realize these are all pre-chewed choices that aren’t really choices at all, you escape the system. You start avoiding making these decisions at all, saving you time, mental effort... and an absolute shit-ton of money. Ironically, this simply accelerates your move up the socioeconomic ladder.
The only way to win this game is not to play.
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
At lower income or entry-level socioeconomic tiers there are choices like these:
Should I buy Tide detergent? Or should I buy All at a 40% lower price point?
Should I buy regular chicken or pay double for organic, free-range, cruelty-free chicken?
As you work your way up the socioeconomic ladder, the questions change shape a little bit:
Should I buy another Honda Civic, or am I ready to step up to a BMW? Or am I the kind of distinctive person who drives an Audi, or a Jaguar?
At still higher socioeconomic levels you can ask yourself things like:
Should I live in Summit, NJ or am really a Basking Ridge kind of person?
Should I send my child to private school? Should I consider Hotchkiss or Choate?
Should I consider the Rolex? Or am I ready for the Patek Philippe?
No matter how high you go, these aspirational questions never end.
Should buy a pied-à-terre in SoHo, or on the Upper East Side?
Should I winter in Miami? Or Turks and Caicos? Or Buenos Aires? After all I'm quite an international person.
It shouldn't surprise us to find aspirational tiers for megayachts, private jets and major professional sports teams. Remember: billionaires like Larry Ellison and Paul Allen are status-signalling primates too.
As you read though this post, it’s entirely possible that these choices quickly begin to sound ridiculous to a person who happens to be far removed, socioeconomically speaking, from the upper tiers.
Then again: do you think a wealthy person cares about the type of detergent they buy? These "games" appear ridiculous from both angles.
And yet people still believe they need to make whatever choices there are at their level. And, worse, as we move up the ladder (if we are fortunate enough to do so), we effortlessly start to make decisions that used to seem ridiculous, but somehow don't any more because our brains adjust so easily to new levels of wealth, comfort and status.
Now, if you play the money game right and save and invest properly over the course of your life, rest assured: you will be facing decisions at tiers far above where you are now.
The question is, will you make these decisions from a place of self-awareness? Will you understand the greater game being played around you that structures these endless signals, these endless aspirational products? Or will you be a checkers player, obediently and enthusiastically choosing the Patek Philippe watch when it's your turn to do so?
Eventually, if you’re lucky, you’ll recognize that a system has set out the frame, the structure, of these choices across your whole life. This system "allows" you to make a series of choices from a series of pre-set menus.
Once you realize these are all pre-chewed choices that aren’t really choices at all, you escape the system. You start avoiding making these decisions at all, saving you time, mental effort... and an absolute shit-ton of money. Ironically, this simply accelerates your move up the socioeconomic ladder.
The only way to win this game is not to play.
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
Tuesday, January 8, 2019
The More We Consume, the Hungrier We Get
Readers, this week I thought I'd share an extended quote from Robert Sapolsky's book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. It touches on topics frequently discussed here at Casual Kitchen ranging from consumerism to hyperpalatable food, and it explains why we humans, sadly, can't help but always want more:
"Once, during a concert of cathedral organ music, as I sat getting gooseflesh amid that tsunami of sound, I was struck with a thought: for a medieval peasant, this must have been the loudest human-made sound they ever experienced, awe-inspiring in now-unimaginable ways. No wonder they signed up for the religion being proffered. And now we are constantly pummeled with sounds that dwarf quaint organs. Once, hunter-gatherers might chance upon honey from a beehive and thus briefly satisfy a hardwired food craving. And now we have hundreds of carefully designed commercial foods that supply a burst of sensation unmatched by some lowly natural food. Once, we had lives that, amid considerable privation, also offered numerous subtle, hard-won pleasures. And now we have drugs that cause spasms of pleasure and dopamine release a thousandfold higher than anything stimulated in our old drug-free world.
An emptiness comes from this combination of over-the-top nonnatural sources of reward and the inevitability of habituation; this is because unnaturally strong explosions of synthetic experience and sensation and pleasure evoke unnaturally strong degrees of habituation. This has two consequences. First, soon we barely notice the fleeting whispers of pleasure caused by leaves in autumn, or by the lingering glance of the right person, or by the promise of reward following a difficulty, worthy task. And the other consequence is that we eventually habituate to even those artificial deluges of intensity.
If we were designed by engineers, as we consumed more, we'd desire less. But our frequent human tragedy is that the more we consume, the hungrier we get. More and faster and stronger. What was unexpected pleasure yesterday is what we feel entitled to today, and what won't be enough tomorrow."
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
"Once, during a concert of cathedral organ music, as I sat getting gooseflesh amid that tsunami of sound, I was struck with a thought: for a medieval peasant, this must have been the loudest human-made sound they ever experienced, awe-inspiring in now-unimaginable ways. No wonder they signed up for the religion being proffered. And now we are constantly pummeled with sounds that dwarf quaint organs. Once, hunter-gatherers might chance upon honey from a beehive and thus briefly satisfy a hardwired food craving. And now we have hundreds of carefully designed commercial foods that supply a burst of sensation unmatched by some lowly natural food. Once, we had lives that, amid considerable privation, also offered numerous subtle, hard-won pleasures. And now we have drugs that cause spasms of pleasure and dopamine release a thousandfold higher than anything stimulated in our old drug-free world.
An emptiness comes from this combination of over-the-top nonnatural sources of reward and the inevitability of habituation; this is because unnaturally strong explosions of synthetic experience and sensation and pleasure evoke unnaturally strong degrees of habituation. This has two consequences. First, soon we barely notice the fleeting whispers of pleasure caused by leaves in autumn, or by the lingering glance of the right person, or by the promise of reward following a difficulty, worthy task. And the other consequence is that we eventually habituate to even those artificial deluges of intensity.
If we were designed by engineers, as we consumed more, we'd desire less. But our frequent human tragedy is that the more we consume, the hungrier we get. More and faster and stronger. What was unexpected pleasure yesterday is what we feel entitled to today, and what won't be enough tomorrow."
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
Tuesday, January 1, 2019
When the Student is Ready, the Teacher... Was There All Along?
Readers, once again, thanks for indulging me as I take a break from writing to work on other projects.
*************************
Everybody's heard the following saying so often it's become a near-cliche:
When the student is ready, the teacher appears.
But I've been wondering about this expression lately. I think it means more than it means.
Think about it: Is it really plausible that the very moment I'm ready to learn something, the universe knows to plop a teacher right there, right next to me?
Right then? Really?
I mean, as much as I'd love to think otherwise, the universe doesn't revolve around me. Heck, the universe doesn't even know who I am. Or for that matter where I am.
And the presumption that the universe not only knows all these things, but also knows my exact level of "readiness" for a given lesson… well, now we're beginning to border on pathological narcissism.
Yet this saying is still true, strikingly so, almost to the point of being eerie. I've seen many, many examples of teachers “appearing” at just the right time, not just in my life, but in the lives of almost everyone I know.
Which is why I think this expression means something completely different, something shocking: It suggests that we are surrounded by teachers, the right teachers, all the time. For everything! It's just that we're too busy stiff-arming all these teachers and all these opportunities to learn.
We ignore or reject advice, we use "yes-but" tactics, we react emotionally or with rage, and we shoot down their ideas and teachings with a wide range of ego-defending excuses and rationalizations.
The only reason a teacher occasionally "appears" is because at that time, for whatever reason, we didn't stick out our arms and block the insights--insights that, all along, were right there for the taking. In other words, we were "ready."
So, imagine: What if we stopped stiff-arming all the teachers? What if, instead of letting in a teacher only when we're ready, what if we just stayed ready?
I bet a lot more teachers would appear. After all, they were there all along.
***********************
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
*************************
Everybody's heard the following saying so often it's become a near-cliche:
When the student is ready, the teacher appears.
But I've been wondering about this expression lately. I think it means more than it means.
Think about it: Is it really plausible that the very moment I'm ready to learn something, the universe knows to plop a teacher right there, right next to me?
Right then? Really?
I mean, as much as I'd love to think otherwise, the universe doesn't revolve around me. Heck, the universe doesn't even know who I am. Or for that matter where I am.
And the presumption that the universe not only knows all these things, but also knows my exact level of "readiness" for a given lesson… well, now we're beginning to border on pathological narcissism.
Yet this saying is still true, strikingly so, almost to the point of being eerie. I've seen many, many examples of teachers “appearing” at just the right time, not just in my life, but in the lives of almost everyone I know.
Which is why I think this expression means something completely different, something shocking: It suggests that we are surrounded by teachers, the right teachers, all the time. For everything! It's just that we're too busy stiff-arming all these teachers and all these opportunities to learn.
We ignore or reject advice, we use "yes-but" tactics, we react emotionally or with rage, and we shoot down their ideas and teachings with a wide range of ego-defending excuses and rationalizations.
The only reason a teacher occasionally "appears" is because at that time, for whatever reason, we didn't stick out our arms and block the insights--insights that, all along, were right there for the taking. In other words, we were "ready."
So, imagine: What if we stopped stiff-arming all the teachers? What if, instead of letting in a teacher only when we're ready, what if we just stayed ready?
I bet a lot more teachers would appear. After all, they were there all along.
***********************
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!