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The Longshoremen's Noon by John George Brown, c. 1879

An advertising executive once said that he knew half of his budget was wasted and he didn't know which half. Marketers have a fancy term for that: wastage. And it's been their mission for decades to eliminate waste. Efficiency is the name of the game.

The first time I came across this idea was when I read Rory Sutherland's book, Alchemy. My copy of that book sits in the stack of important books I mentioned a few weeks ago. It changed my perspective on a lot of things, including a culture of optimization which I'd blindly followed previously. Other topics are covered, but at the time I was blown away by Rory's point that wastage can actually be a good thing, especially in advertising (and, in my mind, beyond).

He leverages a lot of evolutionary research about costly signalling. The mere fact that companies like Coca-cola have the bankroll to buy adstock during the Super Bowl signals to consumers that they mean business. It doesn't mean that they are reckless with spending, but rather that they have come to terms that it is impossible for them to track every last sale and attribute it to a particular ad campaign. If they could, they would, but they can't, so they don't bother trying.

In the last few months, I have been seeing this idea everywhere. In any complex system, rational actors understand that some effort is wasted. In finance, there is an acceptable threshold for fraud. In IT, there is a margin of error built into that last tenth of the 99.9% service agreements. Biohackers pump themselves full of vitamin cocktails and submit themselves to strict fitness regiments, all with the disclaimer that they can't be quite sure if every component is making a difference, but on the whole they feel that it's working.

One arena which has not grasped wastage is the world of management, particularly in the technology sector. Many software firms have doubled in size since 2020, and in the last six months they've been feeling the come down after the manic pixie fever dream that was the lockdown internet boom. Naturally, they now need to cull their workforce to reflect the current economic reality.

This comes after an explosion of day in the life of a Meta product manager, where college grads flaunted their lavish workplace perks, yet didn't appear to be doing much work. Anthropological studies can be found elsewhere, but there were a lot of tech workers (often the people actually doing the work) pointing out the elephant in the room: software companies are bloated and have started to turn into adult daycare.

When Elon bought Twitter and fired (or lost) thousands of people, pundits were watching with wide eyes. I recall venture capitalists tweeting that many founders and CEOs were eager to follow suit, knowing that they grew too much, too soon. Having a very successful and very public example of a workforce reduction would support the case of many leaders hoping to do the same. The message was clear: we're going to get rid of the bloat and the unproductive people.

Initially, I was right there with them. I spent a year and a half in what I'd consider a tier 2 software company, and had many of the same thoughts. What in the hell are all these people doing every day? What's with all of these weird cultural committees? Why is there not someone breathing down my neck to get work done? Have we really not been able to ship anything of substance in a couple of years? What gives?

But then I remembered that old saying, and tweeted “Half of my employees aren’t productive; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” I followed up with a thread talking about the challenges of finding the fat to trim in the first place.

Knowledge work is not like an assembly line. It's hard to get smart people to follow a process, even if you could come up with one that is effective. There is no equation which can help you say something like if this engine was assembled 30 seconds faster, we could make and extra 5,000 vehicles this year.

Many project and engineering managers are silly enough to think that lines of code or number of commits or response time to pull requests is an appropriate analog. And product people like to trot out their roadmaps, thinking that having a plan can be equated to efficient work. Everyone knows that estimating work efforts only creates temporary, short-term certainty, yet executives everywhere demand eighteen month plans.

And they get those plans, only to be consistently disappointed when work isn't going out the door when their Gantt chart claimed it would. They apply pressure, and the drive for efficiency intensifies. Scope is absolutely gutted in hopes that something, anything can get out the door.  That works, but the work is of such dismal quality that it needs to be torn down and built again.

You may be noticing a tension here: how are these companies so generously staffed but so short on time? The common answer is that they are rife with unproductive practices, whether it be excessive meetings or silly cultural LARPs or just downright poor hiring standards. On the surface, these seem like satisfactory answers with clear remedies: more stringent meeting policies and closing the committees and recruiting higher quality talent.

But remember, half of employees are unproductive, and we don't know which half. You could also say that all employees are working at half capacity, but we don't know which half of their time is wasted.

Are there some people who skate by without working at all? Not for long. They eventually get caught, and they are a tiny group anyways. The vast majority of workers are smart: they always remain busy. They keep their calendars filled with meetings and volunteer to take on remedial tasks so that when their boss checks on them they always have updates to give.

Within that busywork are vital meetings and tasks which are required for the operation of the business. The trouble is, at a sufficiently large company, there are too many todo lists and calendar invites to do a proper audit. And even if you could, such a fact-finding mission would erode trust. The best any manager can do is point out the problem, make obvious corrections, and remind their subordinates to use their time wisely.

So you still don't have a grasp on the actual work. You may be able to gather that you aren't reaching your milestones or that you're lagging behind KPI targets, but you're no closer to understanding how to remedy the situation. If that happens long enough, the bean counters begin to worry, and layoffs shuffle their way to the boardroom table.

It's peculiar how the average employee thinks about layoffs. This place would fall apart without me may be on America's top ten most frequently uttered phrases. A long time ago I made peace with that: it may be the case, but they will certainly manage without you. Regardless, employees know the critical functions they perform, but they're bad at communicating about it. I suspect they do not want to be held accountable for poor performance, so they don't take full ownership. Anyways, because people generally perform their duties to a satisfactory level, the machinery of the business keeps humming along.

This was very much the case at Twitter. Everyone was worried that the significantly reduced staff would lack both raw manpower and systematic expertise to keep that paricular machine running. After finding holes in the staff, the company had to convince and coerce people it had fired mere days earlier to ensure they had a skeleton crew. The verdict is still out: there have been minimal interruptions thus far, but there's an off chance some certificate will need to be renewed this June and the only guy that knew about it is long gone.

Thinking through this case again brings me back to the 50/50 concept. I think there are a couple of corellaries to Chesterson's fence creeping in most companies.

First, somewhere within any business is a wizard of a man who built some system, line by line. He knew the ins and outs and the gotchas. His domain ticked along without interruption, save for that 0.1% of alotted downtime. Perhaps he spent 4 hours a month maintaining this system, and the rest sun tanning on the roof. If his year's worth of work amounted to 50 hours, and his salary was $300k, but preventing incidents saved the company millions, that sounds like a great deal for everyone.

Or, take an R&D engineer, who is exploring the possibilities for the company. She is speculating where the market will be in a few year's time. She's entralled by her work, even though she's had little material output thus far. All of those 60 hour weeks have so far yielded nothing. That's the way innovation goes. You keep chipping away, investing whatever time and money makes sense, because you know at some point the world will change and you need to be prepared. Just because there's not clear output doesn't mean that the work is not valuable.

Corporations like to categorize employees as cost centers and money makers. If your department doesn't bring in revenue, it's a cost center.

I like to categorize employees as maintainers and innovators. If you department does work that keeps the lights on, you are a maintainer. These categories are not mutually exclusive. Maintainers must be able to innovate, and innovators have to keep in mind that someday their work must be maintained. Both maintainers and innovators are required if a company is to have sustained success.

Now, you might be wondering what this maintainer-innovator paradigm has to do with the 50/50 principle. After all, a simple recategorization doesn't change the facts on the ground: product still needs to get shipped and people must coordinate amongst themselves and feel safe doing so. How does that fix the efficiency problem?

My answer is that, like the advertiser above, companies must make peace with wastage. An hour just an hour. A line of code just a line of code. Your quarterly targets are just that. All of that is the stuff, the substance, that makes up every business. Yes, work must get shipped and money must be made. Hard times will eventually knock on your door, forcing you to trim the fat.

At the end of the day, it's all about making sure that the show goes on. The maintainer-innovator paradigm reframes operations as the things which are essential for the long term vitality of any company. I like to think of it as an Infinite  mindset towards business. The goal should be to master the inner game of management so that instead of fear, work is powered by pleasure.

Farmer with a Pitchfork by Winslow Homer, c. 1874

In thirty days, I turn thirty. Usually I downplay my birthdays, but changing the leading digit of my age is exciting. Over the last couple of years I've joked that I'll finally grow up when I start a new decade (says the man with a good job and a mortgage). But in recent months I've felt that joke turn into real pressure.

I'm not worried about getting old. Everyone else seems to dread it, but I look forward to it. The past ten years have felt like an eternity, and quite frankly I'm ready for new adventures. The question is: what are those adventures?

I have previously alluded to tension in this regard. I have choices to make, and they have consequences for my next thirty years. I'm not looking that far ahead, but it seems to me like at least the next ten will determine how the decades that follow will go. If my dreams come true, at forty I'll have a family and roots and [cringes] routine. And those dreams come at a cost. How will I be able to afford them? How much of myself and my grander ambitions will I have to sacrifice in exchange?

After I saw the new Avatar movie, I told myself that I'd spend the next ten years putting myself in the position to make movies from age forty to eighty. Maybe that's a career, or maybe just a hobby. But I know I'm interested in making art, and I want to spend time doing that, on my terms, in the back half of life. I realize that to do it on my terms, I'm going to have to bust my ass in the coming years to get there.

I am not made of money. If anything, I have left money on the table in exchange for a relaxed relationship with my work. But that has to change if I want to realize my dreams. It's not possible for me to have it every way. I could either proceed down the path I'm on, and entirely sacrifrice either a family or the pursuit of art. Keep a stable job and have a family, but no resources to make things, or keep my stable job and make things, but not have time and money for family.

But I can do better than a stable job. I'm confident I could jump back on the fast track to management. I know how to play that game, and know the costs and benefits of doing so. I've just chosen not to, either because it would really wear on my soul or because I'm naive enough to think that soul matters in this discussion at all.

There is another option, which is in essence a kind of art in it's own, and it happens to be both the riskiest and most appealling option to me. The question is: am I ready for it?

Being my own boss, and also maybe the boss of other people, means that I not only have to do the work I know I'm good at, but also the work that grates me. This wouldn't be the first time I tried this. A few years ago I had the same aspirations, but the sales and administration components proved too big of a block for me. I am not good at asking for things and I really, really hate paperwork.

Could it be that I just have to grow up? It is not that I'm incapable or otherwise don't understand how. I just haven't had the spirit to give them the old college try. And what I may not make up for what I lacked previously: clear ambition and real consequences.

I think I've also matured in the way I think about running a firm, too. Some better models have come into view, and I'm rubbing elbows with people who have already forged their own paths. Whereas I previously had the lingering feeling that my work was commodified, I now know that I have a unique perspective to offer. That trade means it will actually be more of a challenge to get a firm off the ground, but if I'm successful I would feel more spirited about it.

So, I've gone through the catalog and picked out the seeds. I'm gifting myself a possible future next month, when I put those seeds in the ground. I will spend whatever free energy I have to keep the garden watered and weeded until it bears enough fruit to be sustaining. Maybe that takes just one growing season, or perhaps a few. But I can feel the pull.

The pull towards the life of a yeoman farmer.

The Circus is in Town by Edith Cockcroft, c. 1912

Welcome to America, Earth's official Home of Innovation. Beware, though, not too innovate too much. If you not only solve a problem but solve it ten times better, you will, in the eyes of the State and Public, have no competition.

Lately I've defended two companies accused of being monopolies: Pantone and Ticketmaster (technically Live Nation Entertainment, after a merger). Pantone has long served as a precise color management system that sits between designers and printers. In short, they have a library of colors and technology that allows them to render those colors accurately. Otherwise, CMYK components are mixed together to acheive a color, often with mixed results. Pantone is the standard, and charges a lot of money to use it's reliable system. It doesn't matter if you (or the FTC for that matter) think they are a monopoly. Pantone is a useful technology...period.

Ticketmaster has been in the news for it's (mis)handling of ticket sales for Taylor Swift's latest tour. And before that, there have been all sorts of accusations about scalping and back room dealing and such. I am not claiming that Ticketmaster has a crystal clear reputation, nor am I willing to try to prove or disprove that they are a monopoly.

I am merely here to point out that like Pantone, Ticketmaster is a useful technology. And in a world with a lot of harmful and/or phony technologies, I think we should celebrate the ones who solve legitimate problems, really well.

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It's funny to me that people really only complain about Ticketmaster in the exact scenarios where it's existence is most justified. I can't be bothered to look up the particulars of the Taylor Swift case, but there were something like 14 million people (and bots, more on that later) vying for 2 million tickets. That was 10 million more than the company expected. They used their verified presale system some 400 times without fail, but this time it broke. Regardless of this particular outcome, a 0.25% failure rate is exceptional.

I'd wager that there are but a few dozen companies around that have both the infrastructure and experienced talent to handle that kind of volume spike. Most of them are cloud infrastructure companies and large retailers. I can't think of any others which would be handling a surge of 14 million users. Yes, it's unfortunate that it failed this time, but I'm sure the next time will go off without a hitch.

Meanwhile, there are no other alternatives. Sure, there are a few other ticketing platforms (which are working with Congress to break up Ticketmaster...SHAME!) and I'm sure they could, in theory, have handled this situation. It's a hard problem, matching millions of people to tickets and getting them checked out. Even harder is preventing scalpers from commanding bot armies to buy up tickets for resale.

Fighting scalpers has always been Ticketmaster's big selling point. How do you prevent grifters from buying up all the tickets, constraining their supply and thus driving up the going rate? I imagine in the days of the box office, scalpers just paid people to stand in line and buy tickets in exchange for peanuts, or more likely crack. You can't just walk up to the window and ask for 2,000 tickets, but you could send 250 people to do it for you. I'm sure the economics worked in their favor.

Online ticket sales made this simpler: write a little script that spins up some credit cards and identities to avoid having to exchange drugs for tickets. So Ticketmaster has to get sophisticated in attempts that each order is being placed by a real person. It is a never ending arms race. Vigilance is needed to stay one step ahead of the bot armies. Nobody is ever perfect, so some fraud is expected.

As the internet took off, Ticketmaster lobbied the government on two fronts: one that helped them bring charges against scalpers, and another that required state sponsorship of ticket resellers. I imagine the second was pushed in order to prevent a scalper from creating a legal business entity and claiming itself a reseller. This authorized reseller legislation helped bolster legitimate competitors like SeatGeek and StubHub.

Now, if this were healthcare or insurance or some other opaque industry, nobody would really give a damn. We've collectively written off those industries as lost causes when it comes to sketchy behavior. They may get trotted out in front of a congressional committee every so often, but it's not an event. But Taylor Swift tickets? You never get in between a girl and All Too Well.

The big problem that Ticketmaster solves is not scalpers.

No, Ticketmaster allows artists to keep their ticket prices artificially low.

Artists don't want to be perceived by their fans as greedy pigs. In that light, Ticketmaster is not only the engineer of the clearinghouse for tickets, but also a scapegoat. They are the evil capitalists that make artists' and managers' lives possbile.

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A big critique of Ticketmaster (that's Live Nation Entertainment) is that it not only collects fees on ticket sales, but it also promotes the shows and operates the venues. And they pretty much force you to buy the total package. This is what's known to grubby consultant types as vertical integration. An arrangement like this helps create more certainty in it's supply chain.

In Ticketmaster's case, it knows that the quality of experience at the event is important to get people coming back. We've all been to events at venues we'd rather not return to. So they create systems that help events run smoothly so that artists and guests can enjoy themselves. That takes planning and costs money.

That money is recouped when people purchase the tickets, hence the fees. But when people don't buy tickets, those venue bills don't get paid. So it's important to get tickets moving. Taylor Swift doesn't have that problem but 99% of the rest don't sell out shows.

In order to sell more tickets, Ticketmaster acts as a promoter of the shows. They buy ads and billboards and work with radio stations to get people excited about concerts. Where else do you think the 99th caller's tickets came from?

Without Ticketmaster's vertical integration, I have a hard time believing that live shows would consistently be of high enough quality to keep people paying the prices these artists are asking.

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By now, the Ticketmaster fees have been memed to death. Because the company takes the L and plays the bad guy, the fees for promotion and operation and everything else is tacked onto ticket sales, like an itemized invoice. Sure, it could be a single grand total, with Ticketmaster and the artists negotiating the cut. But that'd be a higher face value and the artists wouldn't be able to maintain their socialist sensibilities.

Which, remember, is the main reason artists still use Ticketmaster. Seeming affordable is of utmost importance to their brands. Laws of economics cannot intervene in the pursuit of cultural relevance.

But, ironically, this turns concert tickets into a status symbol. At the end of the day, if prices are too low, then there are more people willing to buy them. A bidding competition ensues, and suddenly a $60 ticket becomes a $6,000 ticket.

And that's how Taylor Swift, the brand, joins the ranks of Rolls Royce and Gucci. Not by charging obscene amounts of money for an otherwise commodity good, but by making sure that demand for her shows is orders of magnitude larger than the constraints placed on supply.

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So, while it may be possible for Taylor Swift to perform outside of Ticketmaster's realm, it won't happen any time soon, both because of technical and social reasons. This does not excuse any past, present, or future misbehavior by Ticketmaster or otherwise. I don't believe that they are pure in any sense of the world. But they are single-handedly enabling showbusiness at scale.

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Please stay tuned for my forthcoming essay, On the Origins of Showbusiness. Coming soon.

The Confession by Giuseppe Molteni, c. 1838

Lately I've been thinking about discretion. It's the strangest of virtues: you're only aware of it when one is indiscrete. Should someone talk of another behind their back, we assume that this someone will cross us, too. There must be a word for this category, where you're only aware of it when it is violated. Trust is like this too, and I guess it's appropriate that trust and discretion tend to be two sides of the same coin.

I hesitate to even classify discretion as a virtue, because to me, a virtue is celebrated. And you can't celebrate things which you lack awareness. It makes me wonder if discretion is in the midst of a downcycle. Our world seems to honor transparency these days. You can pretty much get a free pass for anything as long as you're up front about your intentions.

On the other hand, it can be hard to even demonstrate what discretion looks like. I'm unable to provide examples without being imprudent myself. For as much as I talk about here and elsewhere, there's a locked box of things which are off limits. Yet, I don't go around telling people I will keep something quiet, I just keep it to myself.

I get the sense that most people aren't trustworthy these days. Or, at the very least, the general consensus is that nobody really trusts anyone else. Whether or not they can actually be trusted is something else entirely.

My hypothesis is that it's never been easier to blabber on about anything and everything, even the nonconsequential things. People rush to admit their own secrets, so it seems that they're not practiced in the art of discretion. And, really, do you want to be the first person to give them a chance?

If anything, transparency (the opposite of discretion) has replaced prudence as a cardinal virtue. That's interesting in an age of virtue signalling. It's easy to make a public proclamation of "truth" but impossible to do so with secrets. We value explicitness more than anything, in both literary and pornographic meanings of that word.

So much of today's culture makes sense when viewed through this lens. I'm a proud sex worker. Here's how my heroin addiction helps me be a better person. Five ways my non-monogomous relationship improved my life.

Transparency, as a virtue, has enabled lifestyles of vice, which have historically been pushed to the margins of social life. Not only have people broken the norms, but they are proudly flaunting them now. It's no longer enough to get away with something. You've got to let everyone know you pulled one over on them, whoever that is.

I can't help but wonder what is lost with such nakedness. Innocence, for starters. I don't think you can go back unscathed. Sometimes you hear about people who have been reformed and are much better for their struggles, but I imagine the ratios there aren't favorable. More often people continue spiralling. And maybe that's not a bad thing. Maybe those are cautionary tales for the rest of us, and the victims of vice are some kind of modern scapegoating mechanism.

These hedonists don't seem to fully grasp causes and effects. It's not that prospective employers and friends and partners don't want to trust them. It's that the hedonists have previously shown their capacity to put themselves above others...blatant selfishness. So any reasonable person is going to be skeptical of even the most reformed child of vice.

I guess it all comes down to [cringes] personal responsibility. That's the lame but obvious answer...tried and trued advice passed down for eternity.

But, to play a little bit, I think we can probably meme ourselves into a better spot. I think that Making Commitment Cool Again is a start. One can assume that behind a given commitment are these intangible qualities like discretion. Maybe we could also play our cards a little closer to the vest. You know, intimacy doesn't need to be a speedrun. Good things take time, and remaining playfully reserved could introduce some mystery to life.

We could also just roll our eyes and yawn whenever someone says look at me...watch me flash my private life. Tell them to do some psychoanalysis or maybe create some art that may help them reconcile their troubled psyche. I'm sure there's all kinds of fun stuff in Freud and Jung about the unconscious that might be helpful to them.

At the end of the day, it's clear that we live in an increasingly low-trust world. Trust is foundational for being able to negotiate with friends and foes, so if we can turn that ship around I think we'll find that a lot of other problems become much easier to solve.

The Alchemist by Mattheus van Helmont

Alchemy is to Science as Paganism is to Religion. The former were foundational for the formalized institutions that would come later. And now that we have these big, shiny things, we laugh off alchemy and paganism.

What's interesting is that most people are still alchemists. They aren't very calculated and don't tend to follow a methodology and certainly aren't trying to prove anything. They're just trying to make bread and wash their hair and soothe their fussy children. Science might claim to have solved those problems, but we've known those answers for thousands of years.

It's pretty clear to everyone that nuanced domestic tasks cannot be boiled down to a five step program. Just a few months ago, I realized that'd I'd been washing my hair wrong, for as long as I've been doing that, probably to my follacle's detriment. I had no idea what it actually felt like to have completely cleaned my hair, but as far as I knew I was doing everything right. I thought my hair looked bad because there was something wrong with me, but turns out it was just a build-up of oil and minerals in between visits to the salon.

It gets me wondering what other things I'm doing by the book which are actually not right. This is a classic case of you don't know what you don't know. I couldn't have even come up with a question for my hair stylist to figure this out. It was actually an accident, as I was trying to figure out why my skin was dried out and itchy. As it often does, Reddit provided answers.

There's just so much knowledge that we acquire through experience, so many little tips we pick up from the people in our lives. It'd be silly to try to put these kinds of things in a book, or write instructions for handling every last edge case. People either figure things out, or they don't and find ways to cope. So, we just tinker our ways through life.

All of it, from the learning to the cope, is alchemy. A scientist may be able to study things, and simplify the situation in order to validate a hypothesis. But even if they make progress, they almost never come close to creating grand theories of reality. And even then, for you and me, the grand theories don't hinder our daily lives. We learn about gravitational force well before we learn the theory, if we ever do at all.

So, how do we get people to embrace alchemy in it's fullness? Is it as simple as telling them that every time they bake bread they are performing a magical act? Does there need to be a sustained crisis of faith in Science? Can we just point to successful alchemists and tell people that they can have that too if they just do a little tinkering of their own?

Or do we need to go further upstream? Do we need to get people in touch with their senses so that they're capable of perceiving small changes? At the end of the day, reveling in your vitality is a pretty powerful force. People are often unaware of the severity of their situation until it has improved. Can we somehow prime people to anticipate this kind of thing?

All I know is that embracing the spirit of alchemy has done amazing things for me. And I know for a fact it does for others too. I'll leave you with a tangential Twitter thread I wrote earlier, which is ostensibly about alchemy: https://twitter.com/boldlybryan/status/1617219971842547716

The Fruit Market by Giacomo Legi, c. 1625

Around a year ago, I started doing my grocery shopping at Whole Foods. It initially started because they're one of the only stores in town that reliably stocks the 4% milkfat Siggi's Icelandic Yogurt. The closest store is about a ten minute drive up I-71, but there are probably a hundred places to buy groceries closer than that. But that yogurt is worth it, and deserves it's own love letter.

This choice dramatically changed my relationship with food. Although ten minutes isn't a long drive, it's just far enough away that I only go to Whole Foods once a week. That means I have to plan for the entire week ahead. Previously, I'd stop at Kroger (about 3 minutes away) roughly every other day to get just what I felt I needed. I never really had anything to eat in the house, so meals turned into a just-in-time operation. That seems romantic, especially when you see movie characters in New York or Paris toting a few things back to their apartment to whip up a nice meal.

But that's not how I experienced it. In reality, in order to make something I had to both go get all the ingredients and then come back home to cook them and then clean up. Way too much work for a starving bachelor who needed something in his belly two hours ago. Instead, I'd often end up getting takeout or drive-thru or during peak pandemic, delivery.

And when I did make it to the store, I'd get some real food, but also smuggle some junk in, especially during those on-a-whim-with-empty-stomach trips. Every other day I had the opportunity to get ice cream and cereal and all kinds of other nutritionally void snacks. My diet for many years was a rollercoaster, and all it took to get off was changing where I shopped. Whole Foods has plenty of trash foods (though still a fraction of supermarkets) but they are expensive and live in packages that make you wonder if it's really going to taste good or not.

Really, the big change has been that I always have food in the house, and none of it of the low quality snack variety. But that means I have to cook pretty much daily. Siggi's might be the only effort-free item in my fridge and pantry, which is why I eat three or four pounds of it a week. Everything else requires some preparation. Thankfully, I love to cook, even moreso when I have a pantry stocked with ingredients I enjoy.

Any more, I probably eat out a couple of times a month, and as time goes on even that feels like too much. Most food not made at home feels like poison to me. Like, the slightest bit of seed oil sends me to bed and I wake up with a hangover. Even tomatoes and peppers are a treat these days after I figured out that they cause me great distress. On one hand, it's painful when I have run-ins with disagreeable foods, and also a bummer that I can't eat much red sauce. But when I steer clear of dietary triggers I feel unstoppable.

Tonight, I made a quick pit-stop at Kroger to restock a couple of things I'd missed during my last trip to Whole Foods. This happens maybe once a month, either when I have an emergency or need to restock something that isn't available at Whole Foods. It's always jarring. Supermarkets are overwhelming, with inventories a hundred times larger and shinier and brighter than a fancy market. And maybe even more interesting is the socioeconomic differences, but I will leave that be for now.

So I enter the lobby and I am immediately greeted by a 64 square foot display of Oreo Cookies and three full pallets of sodapop. That's common fare for supermarkets, or at least Kroger. If I remember correctly (I was a Kroger grocery clerk for a few years), those lobby spots are leased out to Pepsi and Coca-Cola and Mondelez and the rest of the food and beverage industrial complex. Each of those companies have their own merchandisers travel from store to store to manage inventory. Kroger doesn't really want anything to do with it's lobbies because it knows that the big brands are the main attraction.

Anyways, as I walked into this now foreign place, it really struck me that Oreos and Coca-Cola is this week's welcoming committee at the foodstuff palace. Next week it might be Gatorade and Ritz crackers. I'm sure a couple of weeks ago it was comprised of some slightly healthier snacks to coincide with better new year's habits. But in the end, the first thing most people see on their grocery trips is nutritionally garbage. They may pass into the produce section next, but it's too late, they've already been primed to notice the junk.

Once you're in the supermarket, you can confirm that most people are indeed buying this junk. To be blunt, they're fat, often excessively so. I'd wager that the obesity rate in the store is much higher than the national average of 42%. You also can't help but see beyond the body mass and see people who seem to be spiritually helpless. I know, because I've been there before. I don't think psychologists and physicians have the slightest clue what's going on here, but I digress.

Shopping at Whole Foods has been entirely different. Even the boomers are hot there. It's not uncommon to overhear employees sharing their meditation practices or fellow shoppers trading recipes for a good soup. There is sometimes a certain whiff of pretentiousness, but if I'm being honest my snooty detectors are going bad as I become one of those guys myself. I really think Whole Foods may be the closest thing America has to utopia at scale. I'd say it's worth the premium, but over the last year I've significantly cut my grocery bills, so it's actually a bargain.

I'm afraid I have buried the lede here, and the clock is ticking.

What I really mean to say is that us humans are shaped by the ecosystems we inhabit. And, importantly, we don't get much choice about it. And even if we did have tons of variety, the reality is that most people aren't even aware of the situation. They just show up at the nearest grocery store when they need food and sort of follow their desire, which isn't really theirs to begin with, is it?

Some of it is nature, some of it is nurture, but a whole lot of it is something else entirely. Our view of human behavior so often lacks an element of space and time. the nature-nurture argument focuses on childhood development, thinking that even if we are a blank slate, by the age of 7 the rest of our lives are determined. But where is the room for will? Why don't we expect people to change when they leave home at 18 or shack up with a love at 31 or become an empty nester at 55?

Nowadays, people are changing residences faster than the speed of light. They have access to incredible volumes of information that present radically different ways of living? Are we so lazy as to just throw our hands in the air and leave things up to the gods? Or are the capitalists the real gods, and we stomach their soydrinks despite our protest?

The world around me is so clearly sick, so I'm going to need some answers.

The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1563

There's a meme about dads in construction, who drive around town and brags to their kids about everything they built. Hell, my dad even did this, and he only did odd jobs with his plumber buddies. Yep, back in 97, he ran all the copper at that old party store.

But even for his day job, my dad busted his ass, driving all over Michigan to help manufacturing plants keep their assembly lines going. He'd see a V8 Cadillac and rattle off a story about working in the Northstar engine plant. I always remember him being proud of his work helping automakers automate the process of building a vehicle.

I never took to the family line of work. My dad's brothers are all engineers of some sort, following my grandpa, who was a mechanical engineer. He designed a lot of tooling for General Motors, and he'd have you know that he made a tricky part on the Corvette possible (the A pillar, I think). Nonetheless, I come from a family of people who made it easier to build cars.

My dad had hoped I'd follow suit, or at least nudged me towards a path he knew. I had strong analytical skills as a kid, a by middle school I'd surpassed the math ability of my parents. I'd also taken an interest in drafting, mostly because I enjoyed sitting at the board and going through the ritual of taping a sheet down and drawing a frame with the sliding edge and labeling the work with perfect block caps.

But the analog part of drafting was only to get a student's feet wet. I'd started to learn CAD in middle school, and by my freshman year of high school, I'd already mastered it. Me and one of my best friends were the only 9th graders in an otherwise senior class of 35. While everyone else dicked around, we'd finish a week's worth of drawings in a class period, only to dick around the rest of the week.

The lack of tactile feedback in CAD ruined drafting for me. Up until that point, I was convinced I'd be an engineer, or at the very least an architect. But growing bored of something at 14 isn't a good sign, so during my sophomore year I broke free of all the industrial-engineering elective classes and leaned hard into my school's business curriculum, thinking I'd be an investment banker or something. And boy was I wrong.

Nowadays, I spend my days in CAD software, creating plans for the people who write the code that is supposedly eating the world. But I really should say spend my days, because often I string together several days where I'm not doing any designing at all. Most of software planning is talking with other people about the problems, and then writing down the specifications in prose. In art, a picture might be worth a thousand words. But in software, every picture must be paid for with 1000 words. I'm starting to think the writing is the only redeeming part of my work.

After nearly a decade in this profession,  I don't feel like I have much to show for all the time. Unlike the construction worker, I can't do a drive-by on an old job if I happen to be in the neighborhood. Much of my work is hidden behind corporate firewalls, and even if it wasn't, software changes so fast that most of the projects I've shipped have been made redundant. Then there's all of those speculative projects that never went into production.

I envy the graphic artist, with stacks of accordion folders and flat file drawers overflowing with work. Real, tactile work, which before the days of CAD, was the result of a long process that involved taking film photographs and splicing typography and cementing them down to paper. And then it had to go back and forth for revisions before getting couriered to the printer so it could exist in the world.

That process, and the resulting work, was evidence of a hard day's work. It may not have been back-breaking, like a mason's work, but when all is said and done there are artifacts which show your hand. Some day, you can rummage through your archives and scatter the work across your dining room table and marvel in your body of work.

In software, everything is incremental. I might spend a couple of months working on a new feature, which is merely a minor tweak to an existing interface. It often feels like groundhog day because there's inevitably back and forth, where I retrieve some minor detail from an old version to add to the current one. And then I do the same thing for a couple of concurrent projects.

It's never clear to me that I've actually done anything, and I can't say I ever really feel like I put in an honest day's work. Most of it is meetings and remixing things that already exist. And there aren't any artefacts that tell me I am indeed doing something. Software always gets overwritten, often within just a year or two. And it's not like we're allowed to keep copies of proprietary codebases, and even if we were, it's likely that computers in a decade won't be able to run those ancient instructions anyways.

It's a real shame that my best work will eventually disappear without a trace. How much longer can I keep at this? I'm really not sure. But as much as I enjoy building furniture and renovating my house, that's not work, and sooner or later I'm going to have to start producing real things. Pixels never last, but atoms surely do.

The Death of Saint Joseph by William Blake, c. 1803

I'd never listened to John Prine before 2019, and to be honest I'm not sure I'd ever heard of him before then. He was featured on some Spotify playlists and that was really that. I had no idea of his illustrious career as a singer and songwriter until he passed in 2020.

When that happened, there was a surge of John Prine appreciation, and his impact became crystal clear. It was really the first time I'd thought about legacy, or at least in a meaningful way. Often, people die, and in it's grieving, the world will say very nice things about them. So I don't know that I had noticed sincerity in these situations. But when Prine died, I could feel it, despite little awareness of his career and it's importance to music.

For Prine, it wasn't just his musical prime that influenced generations of songerwriters. From all accounts, he was kind to up and comers, using his influence to shepard their careers. YouTube is filled with videos of Prine playing shows in his twilight (a couple of my favorites are with Sturgill Simpson and Amanda Shires).

Those two, and countless others, shared their gratitude for both Prine the artist and Prine the man after his death. I can't seem to find it, but Shires and her husband Jason Isbell had a nice tribute livestream, where they played their favorite JP tunes and shared their stories.

That's when I realized the true meaning of heaven. It isn't some mystical spiritual realm where souls go after they leave the body. To the contrary, heaven is here, on Earth, within each and every one of the living. It is the memories we have of the fallen and the fingerprints they left on our stories.

---

Today, another famous artist died: David Crosby, of Crosby, Stills, and Nash (and sometimes Young). Like Prine before, I'd not listened to much CSN(Y), and, if I'm being honest, what I had heard was not quite to my tastes. That is, until last year. Wooden Ships (a Crosby tune) came on the radio, and the opening riff hooked me. That sent me deep into the catalog, past some of the fluffier tunes and towards the groovier bluesy tunes. I've since become a pretty big fan of their stuff.

Coincidentally, Shires and Isbell also became friends with Crosby in recent years. I like that pattern, and it's making more and more sense why I love that couple's music. Contrary to most YouTube comment sections, good music, which honors it's influences, is alive and well, because contemporary artists are spending time with their forebears.

Amanda shared this clip of herself, Dave Cobb, and a few others hanging out in a studio with Crosby while recording Isbell's Reunions (very inspired by the 60s folk rock sounds, may I add).

It was mostly just David Crosby getting stoned, and picking some of his tunes. He demonstrates a guitar tuning and chord progression that Garcia (Jerry?) had taught him, before he goes on to offer a simple line about songwriting:

If you don't write it down, it didn't happen.

That was of course meant as creative advice, but in the spirit of this reflection, they are words can be applied to life, too. If you don't do something and connect with people, and you haven't writen your legacy_,_ did it even happen?

Will you be admitted to heaven?

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/A_RFT7WcXxE?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

Hunters in the Snow by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1565

It's been four years, give or take a few days, since my life (as I then knew it) shattered. Most of us grow up believing our lives will go a specific way. And mine did, for quite some time. But one day it just seemed like the printer that was feeding me my script ran dry, pushing out blank pages instead.

A lot of people think divorce is this long, drawn out affair. Maybe that's because most of them are the result of actual affairs that left two bitter souls in it's wake. Mine wasn't. Instead, it was a blur. Turns out that you can go from seemingly happily married to single in less than 8 weeks, even less if you satisfy the filing state's minimum duration of residency.

I've avoided writing about this before because I wasn't quite sure how to approach it. Even now, I am jittery as I peck at my keyboard, seeing what may come of this. I'm not even writing about that, the part between my soul and another's. I wouldn't even know what to say about that, because that was an emotional eternity ago. I write this, today, in part because I am unable to inhabit the mindset I must've had four years ago.

And that is a blessing. It means that I've transcended the anguish and decided it was best left in that moment. And that's why, tonight, I am writing of optimism, of the hope that better days lie ahead.

---

It's really something, to shatter. To be a whole man with a personality and a plan and then find yourself sweeping up the pieces. You pull them from the pile you spent months sweeping, and lay it on the table. Where did this one go? Actually, where did it come from? I don't remember that modification. Was it from that one time a crush rejected me on the playground? Who knows.

That's a lie, though. It turns out I'm quite good at introspection, at finding the skeletons in my closet. I went to a few therapy sessions before that I made that realization. I'd showed up prepared for the hour as if I was taking an entrance exam. There wasn't a question asked of me that I hadn't already asked of myself. I guess you could say I tested out of that program and got invited to the Gifted and Talented program at the Academy for Spiritual Regulation.

Around this time I started speed-running a lot of cringe-y new age stuff. I'll say that neo-buddism is extraordinary as a coping mechanism. If the mechanisms work for prisoners of war, they'll suffice for a civilian with a good job and a nice family and a roof over his head. I'd say I went through the motions for a while with that stuff, probably longer than I should have.

I couldn't quite put my finger on it at the time, but in retrospect there is a certain softness in that line of thinking that doesn't suit my temperament. Calming yourself down is fine when you need to self-soothe, but you can't do that forever. Anxiety is a signal that something is wrong, and you need to figure out what that thing is so you can fight it.

Turns out, for me, that something was passivity. I'm really, really glad I figured that out. Neo-buddism reeks of passive behavior, and if I'd stuck with a practice in that vein I'd surely still be in purgatory. Along with that, I was pretty close-minded, blocking out the inconveniences of my life, very much in a meditative sense.

When the pandemic shut down the world, I was about a year into this. Right around that time, I felt like I had Grown a lot and was starting to get my footing. Maybe I had, and circumstance pushed me back down. But 2020 was year two of purgatory, and in some ways much worse than the first. The lows were lower (briefly flirted with alcoholism), but the highs came back. Despite the weird social situation, I was making friends with my neighbors and starting to feel at home in a city which I had no connections (god how did I forget the hundred-of-miles-from-family part of the story?!).

In hindsight, I'm not quite sure where I would gone had it not been for the Sickness. It afforded me time to retreat, to figure out who I was and what I hoped to be. When you can't feel pressure to go out and have the social life of a twenty-something, you end up having plenty of time to get into ultramarathoning and building yourself a shitty farmhouse dining table and read obscure blogs that are gateways to other intellectual universes.

Those are mere activities, but each of them has trafficked in a new mindset. What's interesting to me is that these weren't new mindsets at all. They all existed deep within me, and ones I lived for much of my youth. Ones that celebrated gritty work and vibrant play and the joy of endless possibility. The world slowly relieves us of all these things...it's our job to recover them.

I often joke now that 20 year old Bryan would be mortified if you'd showed him what his life would be like at (almost) 30. But at 10, I'd have thought I was living the dream right now. You mean I get to live in an old house (like the kind you see on TV) and you have the sweetest dog (who could run for mayor) and you have a Very Loud guitar amplifier that you can play whenever you want?!? SIGN ME UP.

I have my theories for how and why we lose our spirit as we grow old. But I know that it can be recovered by embracing play and doing hard work and stomaching uncertainty and re-realizing the joy of infinite potential. Much of my first 17 essays here have orbited those bodies, and many more will too.

And in finding spirit again, I seemed to have wiped that grief from my memory. It's remnants are still there, like the ghosted equations previously erased from the blackboard, no doubt. But if you keep scribbling and erasing and scribbling some more, you eventually write over the past with new memories.

I guess that's an apt metaphor, since for all intents and purposes, this is my dissertation on a four-year post-trauma program. Much pacing was done, back and forth and back and forth, as I theorized my way out in chalk, only to realize that the real answer to my equation was to step back, turn around, and simply lvie.

---

I have resisted writing something like this for a long time. I often roll my eyes at these kinds of diary entries. But maybe my disdain is a signal that there's something to be found in this noise. I don't plan to make a habit of this, that's for sure. Going forward, I'd much rather survey all of human experience and write some fiction which may have a sliver of myself within. Thanks for bearing with me. –Bryan

At the Roulette Table in Monte Carlo by Edvard Munch

I once again downloaded the Instagram mobile app on Sunday. There were some things I wanted to post, and the mobile web version isn't very good at that. I otherwise try to keep the app off my phone, because it's a black hole. I have a lot to say about Instagram, both as a business and as a cultural force. It's all over the map, so here are some thoughts:

1. The app version is a black hole, with all it's ads and fancy full-screen casino features. The web version lacks these things, and is generally slow and painful to use, but is more respectful to attention, so I use it to keep tabs on the things I care about in between times when I want to post.

2. If it weren't for the algorithm and casino features, you'd perceive Instagram as a stale feed. This is evident to me when you switch between the app and web versions. When using the latter, it will sometimes be many days before something new shows up in the feed. The algorithm fills in those gaps so that users perceive Instagram as a fresh place instead.

3. The casino features are meant to get people invested in using Instagram. They solve the chicken-egg problem of social spaces. People need to be publishing fresh posts regularly in order to have enough to show other users.

4. People are hesitant of posting things that last, which is why Instagram added stories. When you use the web version, without the algorithm, this becomes clear: there are 100 times more stories posted than regular feed posts.

5. The Story has become it's own medium, and has transcended the low-polish ephemerality of it's origins. It's actually Instagram's most robust feature; a canvas for creating posts free of the strict constraints placed on feed posts. It's the only place where you can attach hyperlinks to posts, and there are also a wide variety of games you can attach to stories, like Q&A's, prompts, and more. It's funny that all this engineering has gone into a medium which self-destructs after 24 hours, but it works. Like I said, 100x more stories than posts.

6. If Stories are the fun thing to do with your friends, Reels is like a circus that aims to capture you and your friend's undivided attention. Again, this was another feature copied from a competitor, but I don't think Instagram explicitly did this because they thought it was in high demand. The company has tried to get video to work for the last decade. This is because video unfolds over time, and if it's good, can hold the average viewer's attention for longer than a still photograph. And Instagram is tracking every last second of video. The longer you watch something, the stronger signal you are sending to the algorithm: I'm eating this, please bring me more. Notice I said eating, not liking. There's no distinction between love-watching and hate-watching, there's just a state the algorithm looks for: that the play button is set to on.

7. It's important to note that the posts on Instagram follow a Pareto distribution. I'd say 90% of the content on the platform comes from 10% of the users. And it's not a stretch to say that Reels is probably even more exaggerated than that, maybe a 97-3 split. They're a little bit tougher to make, and require slightly more polish, but users who put in the effort are rewarded when the algorithms boost their Reels.

8. That gets me into the meat and potatoes of my observations. Reels, for the most part, is trash. Very rarely do I come across something truly entertaining, and when I do it's usually from a very creative person who's smart enough to follow established formats and patterns from TV and movie writing. The vast majority is lip synching and coked up montages and just downright dumb shit, like suburban women making countertop nachos. How the algorithm decides I should see some of these things is beyond me.

9. Before the internet, there were a handful of publishing companies and a handful of music labels and a handful of movie studios and a dozen radio stations and papers in each market and few dozen TV channels that we all watched. And all of that was guarded by gatekeepers and tastemakers, that for better or for worse, controlled the quality of programming that made it to our eyeballs. Not so on Instagram.

10. Quality aside, one of the most interesting parts of all this to me is the infinite number of algorithmic realities. There are no arbitors. Instagram and any curious anthropologists may be able to make a rough map, but there are two billion versions of Instagram. Yours is different from mine is different from your mom's. It's not like TV, where everyone watches the same handful of shows. There are millions of personalities for you to divvy out attention, and those slices of attention are so small that no even you, let alone your friends, are aware of it.

11. Still, there are regions of Instagram where a critical mass of users dwell and talk about their own little drama. Sometimes, you'll notice this drama's export into the larger cultural discourse. I think this is most evident in gender wars. The manosphere has been well covered by now. But I think it's just as bad on the girlboss side of things, but it's tough for people to talk about without going scortched Earth. I think most of this talk happens among single people, which leads to the next point.

12. I'd wager that my married friends and my mom are totally unaware of my previous point. Their algorithms show them something entirely different. I imagine my peers with kids have similar drama over parenting. I don't know what boomer algorithms are like, hopefully jolly though.

13. This sort of thing is textbook echo chambers, but I haven't really seen that talked about, I think because Instagram appears to be more about vibes than points-of-view. But I think that there are deeper pathologies behind the vibe, which are making lives much harder than they need to be.

14. The algorithm also has interesting implications on people doing Real Art. Pleasing the machines is a full-time job. You've always got to be performing for the gods, which makes deep work prohibitive. Does Real Art remain behind the gatekeepers and tastemakers?

15. The people who don't make Real Art are platformers, and tend to retread the same topics over and over. They may be moving their lips and gesturing violently, but what are they really saying? Is there anything of substance, or is this just filling time. Will people get bored of this? Or is this just a part of the standard people watch five hours of TV per day sort of thing?

16. There are many, many entry points for sub-average people to contribute to a particular machine, the meta-discourse of the machine, etc. It's hard to notice on IG sometimes, but it is evident on Youtube (not limited to Instagram), which has better search/index affordances for finding things. Everyone is hoping their 15 minutes of fame will stick around for a few years, I guess. And there's not a network exec in site to pull the plug, so they pull the slow fade.

17. Actually interesting to see theorizing on how tiktok wants to become a search engine, and also how Google is Tiktok-ifying it's search results. What do, IG?

18. This stuff is shaping us, and people aren't happy with the way they're being shaped. But there's a learned helplessness (that's often taught by the internet) that prevents people from making a change. there's also a learned sense of agency that pushes people along, using the same tactics to get people to change, but it's often too much too soon, and people fall back into helplessness.

OK, that's all...for now.