Manipulated

I went through a phase in college where I read a ton about behavioral economics, game theory, generally through a poppier type of lens. By far, the best book that I read during this period is Influence by Cialdini.

http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Business-Essentials/dp/006124189X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1390455003&sr=8-1&keywords=influence

I remember telling a fellow intern the summer after my junior year about my interest in understanding why people make the decisions that they make, and he emphatically insisted that I read this book. He said that I would love it — and I did. This book is all about how people’s sense of reality and self-awareness falls apart — and can be manipulated. This sounds pretty evil, but the book is about understanding these patterns of exploitability in order to defend ourselves and others. Still, that doesn’t mean that we aren’t surrounded by people who have a deep understanding — whether trained or intuitive — who will use this understanding in order to gain from our ignorance.

I work for Twitter, and Twitter went public. I won’t be making any fuck you money, but I stand to make a little cash (of course assuming that the stock continues to perform, which is always an assumption). Regardless, when a liquidity event happens there is a constellation of financial planners that come out of the woodwork. The key factor which determines how much a financial planner makes is how much in assets they manage…and finding new clients is tough. When a company goes public — especially a tech company — this means that there is a known group of people who are going to have a windfall, and often won’t know what to do with it.

I ended up meeting with some financial planners who some other people at Twitter had mentioned. I was mainly interested to see if they could help me out with tax complications from the Sweden move (they couldn’t), and more generally I was very interested to see how they would pitch themselves to me. How would they sell their services? Of course, I’m sure that the high net worth guys get an entirely different type of treatment from an entirely different type of salesman, but that’s what this was: sales.

While I was talking to them, I was reminded of an interaction that had happened on the street the other day. I was with a couple of friends in the Mission and we had just left a restaurant or a bar or something. We were figuring out where to go next and a homeless man came up. He sort of stood there, staring at us, then looked at my friend and threw up a fist to make a “pound.” We stared awkwardly. My friend said “nah man, I don’t want to do that.” We walked away. My friend said, “you know, if you engage, they know that you’re going to feel mentally connected.” It’s true, and it’s 100% Cialdini. And I was reminded this when, on the second meeting, the advisors asked me if I thought they had been useful. Sure, I responded (eh, not really, I was thinking inside, but no reason to be mean)… and then one of them immediately pulled out a notebook. “Great! Well, would you mind brainstorming with us some friends of yours who might benefit from our services?” Fuck! They almost had me trapped. In my desire not to be an asshole, I had said that I appreciated their services (and to be fair, even if I felt they hadn’t been super useful, I did appreciate their time and patience… I grilled them like only I can, while recommending that they watch and read a number of finance related classics), and now they were putting my goodwill to the test: if I thought that they were useful, why wouldn’t I want them to help out my friends? They even suggested that I invited them to drinks at Twitter! Masterful (especially given that the rest of their pitch was, honestly, pretty flat). In this case, I legitimately had somewhere I needed to be so I excused myself, but it was a tense moment. And it goes to show how easy it is for us to be manipulated, even in situations where we are completely aware of not only the incentives to manipulate, but also the means.

Me and fashion

There are a numbed of things that you wouldn’t know about me just by looking at me. One of the most obvious of them is one of the most directly to, well, looking at me. I actually have a pretty deep fondness for fashion. I think it is easy to dismiss fashion: it’s pointless! Why bother dressing yourself up like this or like that instead of just going for utilitiarian things that don’t cost a lot, last a while, and do their job — namely, clothing you. This entry, however, is not a defense of fashion (suffice it to say that we are visual creatures and there is no way to get around that). What this IS about is my relationship to fashion.

I’ve always struggled with fashion, and recently I realized that this is part of a larger set of issues that I struggle with: any time there is a large search space, and the quantity to be maximized is abstract.[1] Put more plainly, in the world of fashion there are no right answers, just tenuous notions of what do and do not work. Of course, one can go for “classic” looks that are safe, but that’s not the sort of fashion I admire. The sort of fashion that I really admire reflects a confident sense of self, a bold projection out into the world.

And so I struggle with fashion for many reasons, but I think that might be the most fundamental: I have no sense of self that I want to project. I have no sense of self that feels worth projecting. I think that might be what I find so tantalizing about people who have developed sense of fashion: it feels like they also must then have a developed sense of self. When I walk into a department store (or even a small boutique!) I feel utterly overwhelmed.[2] When I go shopping with my friends, they seem to just sort of magically be able to connect articles of clothing to themselves. And it’s odd: I can make judgements of other people’s taste, but have none of my own. I think it’s becasue what I’m judging is a projection into reality. It’s like the difference between the outcome of some large number of dice that have been rolled, and predicting the outcome. “1 2 3 4 5? That’s amazing!” But if you had tried to predict it beforehand, the odds would have been miniscule. That’s what fashion feels like. Somehow, other people have “the eye.” They know how to take the vast number of choices and condense then into a personal sense of style. The know how to choose the things that do and do not fit in. And I admire them for it.

And as I have never had this ability, my life has basically become an affront to fashion. For a long time I couched this in irony, as many people do. Heck, right now I am wearing a 3 wolf moon t-shirt. I wear sneakers (with the defense that my chiropractor says it’s good for me, but that’s just a convenient excuse). And I avoid shopping like the plague. My friends know this. I am more than happy to go shopping with someone else, but the second that you suggest that we look for things for me I concoct a hundred plausible reasons that all boil down to: “please, no, I’m scared.” I think this fear defines my relationship to many things, but recently fashion stuck out as a clear example of one of them, especially because it IS tied up with our sense of self. That isn’t to say that someone who dresses poorly is worth less as a person, but as I am someone who cares about the world, and about aesthetics, it seems like such an apt metaphor for broader issues that I have with personal identity. Not only do I have difficulty defining myself in intellectual terms, I fall apart when I have to even present myself visually.

People often have the feeling that they are being watched by those around them. Insecurity can make us feel like everyone can see our worst flaws, as if they can see into the rough edges of our soul. But with fashion they CAN see our failings. And just as I’ve given up in fashion, I think as of late I’ve given up the fight on identity — and not necessarily for the better. I’ve just decided not to play. I put on my sneakers, but I also recede into my room. I retreat into the familiar. Shirts that I’ve had since college, music that I love, a good book. None of the pain of trying to reconcile myself with the eyes ears and minds of the people around me.

[1] There are a whole class of problems in life that fit this pattern and I’ve found that I’m pretty bad at all of them.
[2] I should also mention that as of late I’ve realized how many things give me a sense of hopelessless and anxiety…I’ve just gotten very good at avoiding them, or transforming my life so I don’t have to face them.

Musings on sex

When I went to Amsterdam, I wrote a bit about visiting the red light district there, and what a surreal place it was. I’ve always been fascinated by sex work and what it says about the unmet needs and desires that swirl under the veneer of respectability we place on things in our society. And in Amsterdam it’s all there out in the open… and it is as seedy and tacky and terrible as you would expect. But also cheap.

And that’s what shocks me, so often. Sex is terribly expensive when it is free and it is very cheap when it isn’t. There is a lot that could be said about the power dynamics at play which lead to this being the case — that’s not what I want to write about here. What interests me is how the context can change so radically the cost of something so coveted. Our society is dripping with sex. Movies have these awkward sex scenes tacked onto them becasue I guess people enjoy seeing movie stars awkwardly hug each other. Songs talk about it, directly or indirectly. Love, lust, relationships, breakups. Men masturbate constantly, something which everyone has sort of agreed to collectively ignore (kind of like the fact that everyone poops, or the voracious consumption of pornography).

I should get to a point, and the point is that sex is a big part of human society, of our lives on this planet. And in Amsterdam, you can have it for €30. This seems proof indelible that with sex we fall prey to the same mistake we always do: mistaking the representation for the substance. We do this in everything. Take punk, for example. You have a counter-cultural movement which, as a part of it, had a distinct personal style. In a typical inversion, this style came to be the movement. You no longer ended up on the style as a logical conclusion of punk culture, but rather, the appreciation for the style drove you to be a punk. It all just becomes a bunch of superficial signals. This happens any time something out of the mainstream — hipsterdom, hippiedom, whatever — gains serious traction. The signal becomes the substance. And sex is no different. If you can have sex with a beautiful woman for €30, sex is not the important thing. Sex is a proxy for all of the nice things that often come along with sex, even if we haven’t even experienced those things except intravenously through movies and television and songs.

Of course, complicating things with sex is that there is a very real biological drive making us want to do it. People crave release, intimacy. This inversion of substance and it’s representation is built into us, it’s not just an intellectual trick we play on ourselves.

It’s amazing to me, to think of my own trials and tribulations in my life, to put a dollar amount on the intimacy I’ve shared with other people. The amount would not be some shockingly huge number, going by the red light rate. We are chasing something priceless. We are chasing the thing which makes a real, worthwhile sexual encounter so difficult to find. Anyone can go to Amsterdam and have safe, consentual sex for very little money. But finding sex that has that actual substance we crave is really difficult. Even taking a stab at it, for many people, can take years. If you look it up, people, on the whole, have a lot less sex than it’s easy to assume they do.

On me

I’ve spent a lot of time talking how I relate to other people. Be it in terms of friendship, or romance, or anything (such as them mugging me). But something I’ve never tackled directly is how I see myself. I certainly imply it, when I talk about love or dating especially, because I have fairly strong views about why I do not “fit,” in many respects. But I thought it would be interesting to try to actually hone in on what I feel about myself. These days I often describe myself as intense, or difficult. Sometime people agree, often they disagree. What do these words mean? How do I see myself? I’m particularly interested in doing this because when I talk about this with people, I often realize how wrong I am. That my own self-perception is so-often completely divorced from how I am actually perceived. A lot of these of course tie together.

Intense:
This is a contentious one, so I tackle it first. It’s hard to pin down what “intensity” is, since different types of people are perceived as “intense.” But for me, I think my intensity is that I never turn off. As you read the following points below, consider that. It’s not just that I am interested or whatever, but that I am always interested. I am generally at high levels of me, and that rarely drops off. It drops off when I am holed away reading (and perhaps this is why I enjoy reading with others so much, a chance to interact with them in a totally different way). I’m intense because other people do turn off, they do temper themselves. Sometimes they aren’t interested. Sometimes they simply do not care. I don’t want to paint myself as someone who doesn’t understand social norms, that’s not what I mean. But what I mean is that when you interact with me, you’re generally getting a full stream. You can’t turn down the firehouse. And I know that for some people, this is probably overwhelming. (This isn’t to say that I don’t think I can be supportive in a crisis or anything, I’m aware of these things and try to be the person my friends need me to be when they are in need, but long term, I will inevitably be me).

Relatedly is the fact that I am bad with boundaries. I mentioned in this entry that I often go from 0 to 100 with new friends very rapidly — a part of this is that I am bad at having “levels” of friends. It’s an on or off proposition. This, I think, is another source of intensity. People aren’t used to that. They’re not use to you caring, sincerely, off the bat, and so what is sincere and honest is perceived as aggressive and haughty. Even if we could potentially be friends, it can be too much too quickly.

Interested:
I think I am deeply interested in, well, just about everything. Academic subjects, yes. Media, yes. This isn’t to say I know a lot about these subjects, I’d say I know a lot less than I’d like, and a lot less than a lot of people, but I care. I care about what people think and feel. I don’t think this is a bad thing, if anything, it’s probably this curiosity which will help me with what fleeting successes I enjoy. But as I said above, it can be hard to prove sincerity. Which leads too…

Earnest:
I really do care. I think this related to the above, but deserves it’s own line. If we’re talking about you, I want to know about you. I won’t hide it. I’ll ask a lot of questions. And I’ll be honest about my thoughts, my feelings, and my curiosity. But that is at tension with…

Snarky:
It’s funny to mention this, because I just mentioned earnestness. And there is definitely a tension between an earnest appreciation of people and a sarcastic back and forth with them. I think this is a tension which some people find alienating when dealing with me, or at least, they only see one or the other and get confused or even hurt when they sense the other (generally it’s harder when someone is used to my more earnest qualities and then sees my penchant for snark). But i like to think my snark is predicated on a serious amount of security and trust in each other…which is difficult! This connects with a lot of the above, especially intensity. I’m “always on.” Few areas are off limits, and the better I know you, the harder it will be for me to resist. To me, joking like this is one of the beautiful benefits of shared history, of intimacy. That we can take ourselves, our histories, and riff on it. But that’s hard for people. It can be hard to go interleave a serious talk and joking, which I think makes people think I’m a jerk. It certainly undermines the sense of earnest interest I mention above. But for me, I do not separate out my conversations. I very rarely have a “serious chat” where everyone is frowning, or a “happy chat” where we put aside our worldly cares and talk about mundane things. I just chat.

Intense, right?

Examining:
I struggled with whether I should call this examining, or more generally “critical.” Maybe I should have done both. But the point here is that I think about things…almost obsessively. This whole blog, and the Sweden blog, are about publicly airing some of the self-examination that I am constantly engaging in. It has been about having to vocalize how I see the world. But anyone who knows me knows that I try very hard to see myself and the world around me through a critical lens (though I feel like I fall far short of where I’d like to be). This can be tough for people, as people are not always in the mood for abstract conversations about this or that. Sometimes people just want to deal with their own shit. Or sometimes, they don’t want to deal with anything.

Uncool:
I guess this is where I touch on things that are a little more negative. I don’t see this as negative, per se, except in that people like cool people? I’m not cool. I could do a more thorough analysis of what it means to be cool, but I don’t really want to spend the time on it. I don’t have it. I dress poorly, I like a wide range of things, many which are uncool, but more generally, I think that earnestness and intensity aren’t particularly “cool” traits. Cool (when it isn’t at some pernicious high point) involves understanding how to present yourself in a way to maximize the appreciation of others. A lot of time, this involves framing yourself, your opinions, and your interests in specific ways. I means having an understanding, explicit or intuitive, of what people appreciate, and how that appreciation is evolving. And hell, I’d say this whole blog is pretty uncool, really.

Cool is just not something I care about, though that can lead to…

Unsexy:
I think that this is an interesting point in that it’s very different when it comes to men and women. I think that with men this is a lot less true, or at least, there are definitely many men for whom I am “their type,” and for many others, I wouldn’t really be a compromise. I do think a lot of the above traits still conspire to make me unsexy for a lot of people, but it was always much less broad. If people think you are sexy, they’re willing to at least give you a chance. If they don’t, it gets a lot harder! So when it comes to women, I think I’m about as unsexy as it gets. Dating and romance, at least in their mainstream manifestations in our culture, are all about understanding the chess game that is managing the process of going from complete strangers to sharing the most intimate of experiences. Earnestness isn’t sexy, as it gives itself up too easily. People want something rare and special, not something that is so clearly interested. People want to feel like they are earning someone, that they are special, not that you share yourself with everyone (which to be fair I do not, though the specific mechanisms of that are for another blog post). And I’m definitely not many girl’s “type” (though there have been some very, very rare exceptions to this). I’m short, I’m hairy, I’m dorky, I’m intense, I’m earnest. Nothing here screams sexy. I should also say that I imagine my penchant for intense self-examination is unsexy in that it doesn’t sound terribly confident, and confidence is sexy. I think that I am quite confident, but in a specific way. I am confident to question, I am confident to ask, I am confident to feel, to share myself. But vulnerability is not the kind of confidence which makes people have that inexplicable desire to want to be with you. And of course, mixing in with all of this is the bisexuality thing. I think that gay men are more understanding than straight women, probably because they find me more attractive in general, and the dating pool is smaller so they are used to making exceptions. I think, broadly speaking, women find men who have been with men at best unattractive, and at worst deeply threatening.

That isn’t to say that I can’t have success in the dating world, just that I have a fairly calibrated sense of where I exist in it. I heartily welcome discussion on this, though I have a feeling I know where things will go, and I have a blog post planned about that… but there are always surprises! I think this last point, though, on sexiness is where there is an inevitable misunderstanding between many of my friends and myself. I certainly have many good qualities, and I think my friends see that (I hope!). But the way that they gel together is very different when someone is relating to you as a friend than as a romantic interest. Basically, I think that friends are particularly bad at understanding sexiness, at least when it comes to me, because it’s completely orthogonal to how we relate to each other. There’s more to this that I want to explore in another post, the way in which friendship skews how we evaluate our friends, but I think for now the point has been made (though I wonder if people will agree).

Something important to underscore here is that I like myself. I really do. I am comfortable with who I am, with who I am becoming, how I am evolving. I have a lot of great people in my life. I have said this before. But what I am struggling with, I think, is how all of these factors above influence how I relate to others. What is key to who I am, and what can be toggled, reigned in? I don’t care about being uncool. Coolness is a stupid concept to me, and has no place in my life. But I can also appreciate that people appreciate a sense of mystery sometimes (especially in dating), they want something worth wanting. They don’t want someone who is earnest and intense, as that can come across as desperate and odd. And on an even more basic note, women generally want taller guys. Sexiness is particularly tricky because people have very little control over what they find sexy. They might hate themselves, even, for the things they find attractive (an extreme case being pedophiles, for example!), but they can’t help it. And I’ve known many women who feel bad that they are only attracted to, say, tall men… but that’s still their attraction. When it comes to an idea, you can debate and if someone is wrong, it is incumbent on them to change their views. But when it comes to attraction, you can’t force or expect anyone to find anyone else attractive.

And there I am.

On goals

I am a deeply goal oriented person. I’ve known this before, but coming back from Sweden has put this into stark contrast.

I’ve always had a number of goals goal, and I realize now how much of my identity and self-worth has been wrapped up in these goals — even just in the act of having goals, of having something to help define myself to others, to give meaning to my days. I wrote about the nature of repetition, and it was in fact thinking about the repetitive nature of adult life that helped me realize how much my goals sustained me. When you have a goal, you can sacrifice things against it. It’s much easier to justify not doing the legion things you should be doing when it’s for a “good cause,” the goal du jour. It’s much easier to avoid confronting personal issues when you can tell yourself that you just need to accomplish the next goal (then the next and the next) in order to be a less flawed person.

Before college, my goal was to get good grades, to get into a good college. In college, it was to get good grades, to get a good job. As a banker, it was to get out of banking. In DC, it was to get back to SF and be a real programmer. In SF, it was to live abroad. In Sweden, it all began to fall apart. I wasn’t happy and I didn’t know what to do about it. I didn’t have a goal. Learn Swedish? Be…a better programmer? Cook more? How would I define myself? Who was I?

Ultimately, I decided to return, and that question is the only one that remains. What is life about? Right now, life is very low key. I am not unhappy, and I’m doing my best to just enjoy my life for the zen-like peacefulness it offers, because the complication is inevitable. One day it will be a sick spouse or kids or something and I will think back to days like these and sigh. Or at least, that is what I tell myself as I try to avoid that classic restlessness, as I try to avoid grasping at possible ways to return to that familiar, goal-oriented world.

This isn’t to say that I don’t have goals, and that I won’t ever set a big goal for myself again. But what has changed, or is changing, is how I relate to these goals. I don’t define myself against them, or at least I am actively resisting that urge. I am trying to revel in the reality that is my everyday life. It may be simple, but it also has allowed me the time to do a number of things that I really care about. I’m cooking a lot more, I’m reading a lot more, and I am spending what time I can with the people I care about.

But, on the other hand, I know that I am an ambitious person, and at some point I will want to do “something.” I think I can enjoy defining myself by whatever that ends up being, and I don’t think it has to break the simplicity and pleasantness of my current day to day. But right now I am recharging. It has been a long, stressful year. I gave it all I could, and in many ways I came up wanting. And so now I bide my time. But at some point, there is going to be too much energy pent up in my little studio and I’m going to need to do something. I’m hoping that I can channel this energy into human, creative pursuits. Cooking, writing, running, Pilates, reading. And all the while, I wonder what will be that inflection point when I realize that I had even ever had the free time to muse about how much free time I had.

Repetition

Being an adult is about coming to grips with repetition. Being back from Sweden has made this clear to me in a way that I was never before willing to accept. When you are a child, your life is defined by novelty. There is always another semester, another grade, another summer. Everything is changing constantly.

Of course, as an adult things change too. But usually change comes as a tidal wave; it completely alters the texture of your life, and then leaves you to deal with the differences, day by day by day. Now that I am living without a concrete goal (be happy?), I am forced to confront the truth: this is my life.

I’ve always struggled with things that have to be done regularly. I know this can sound odd, given that we are creatures of habit, of periodicity. We breathe, in and out, thousands of times a day. We go to the bathroom. We sustain ourselves with water, with food. We bathe. Still, where I could, I always resisted any non-essential chores[1]. Laundry? I still loathe it in a way that is hard to describe. Cleaning is the same. As is making the bed, or for a long time, flossing. Though now I floss. And slowly I get cleaner. I do the dishes every day. I cook for myself regularly (eating out was an easy way to add constant novelty to the repeated act of eating). I always preferred a big investment up front rather than a lot of small investments, but living alone has really driven home that being an “adult” means doing certain things… forever.

I’ve been seeing a variety of people about my RSI issues. They all recommended a blend of easy exercises that I can do at home, and this has been helping… but I have to do it every day. Forever? More or less. This is intimidating. It’s odd to think of my wrinkled, 58 year old self doing scapular exercises.

Oddly, this repulsion towards repeated actions never applied to my studies, probably because of the fact that while you always have to study, you’re always studying something new. But this is where I found the key…framing. We have the power to change our routines. To change our habits. But this generally means changing one habit for another, not the eradication of habit. I’m realizing that most things worth doing have to be done regularly. Do you love to cook? Cooking is a collection of rituals, most of which don’t involve actually cooking. Browsing recipes, going to the market, preparing to cook, cleaning up afterwards… the vast majority of cooking has nothing to do with actually applying heat to food. And if you want to be a good cook, you will do all of this, day in and day out. The same is true of any creative pursuit: writing? Write everyday. Drawing? Draw everyday. The key, for me, is how you frame it. I try not to see it as doing the exact same thing everyday, but rather, a continuation. When I cook today, I bring with myself the experience from every other day I’ve ever cooked. When I blog today, I’m continuing to refine how I express myself.

At some point, I’m probably going to have to sever that reliance on progression and continuity and accept that a part of the human condition is the droll reality that some things must be done over and over again–without some deep human benefit. Cleaning, for example. And laundry.

But for now, I’ll be content with a happy belly and a messy bed.

[1] thankfully I always realized that bathing was essential. Given my history as an anti-social gamer, this was not a given.