Category: Stoic

Hans Gruber, a Hooters Waitress, Patton, and Health

“And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.  Benefits of a classical education.” –  Hans Gruber in Die Hard

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Alexander the Great loved chewing bubblegum and conquering Persians.  And he’s all out of Persians.  And bubblegum wasn’t invented until 2,251 years after he died.  Poor Alexander.

One thing that I think holds people back isn’t that they plan, it’s that they don’t plan big enough.  I’ve been fortunate enough in my life that I’ve made most of my goals come true.  That may sound like a good thing, but is it?

Of course it is.  It’s really cool to be able to be successful at achieving your goals, because losing sucks, and if you have great goals you end up with Cash and Prizes®.

But what would happen one day if I looked around and said . . . “I’ve done it.  I’ve accomplished everything I’ve set out to do.”  What purpose is left to drive me?  And if I did reach all of my dreams, what’s left to work for?

An example of exactly this happening is Buzz Aldrin.  At the age of 39, Buzz walked on the Moon.  The frikking Moon.  It’s so difficult and expensive to do, we can’t do it today.  Yet Buzz was the second guy to walk on the Moon.  As a goal it’s awesome.  But like the miniature schnauzer that catches a Humvee®, what do you do once you’ve won?  Buzz didn’t have a clue, but he didn’t have a problem asking Jack Daniels™ for assistance.

Another example is General George S. Patton.  Patton had been a highly competent general in World War II – daring, audacious, and cromulent.  Yet, he found himself in a position where the war that he knew how to fight was gone – it was over.  In his diary he wrote:  “Yet another war has come to an end, and with it my usefulness to the world.”

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Little known fact:  French tanks in World War II had rear view mirrors.  Those were so they could observe the front line.

But Patton and Aldrin aren’t alone with this conundrum of having their success be the source of their discontent – you see this behavior again and again.  It’s a common story in Hollywood:  nobody to somebody to discovered cocaine to dead.  Or, if the actor has a heart made of titanium, they become beloved actor Robert Downey, Jr.  The most interesting part of that is the cocaine, especially to Robert Downey, Jr.  Although you might think cocaine comes from Colombia, it really comes from the boredom of having everything you want.

It’s curious that one of the things that keeps us healthy and not developing a liver the size of Johnny Depp is the struggle to achieve a goal.  In the absence of meaningful goals, bad things happen to people.  They drink too much.  They vote for the Left.  They get depressed – why get out of bed when there’s nothing to work for?

Goals are important – and there are two ways that you can lose them:

  • Believe that they are impossible and give up, or
  • Achieve them all and run out of goals.

Essentially these are the opposite problems – one is believing you’ve got to play a football game against the 1985 Chicago Bears® using 11 toddlers.  The other is being on the 1985 Chicago Bears© and playing 11 toddlers.

dallas

I know it’s a soccer ball in the trophy.  It’s not like the Cowboys® would recognize a real football.

Both are no-win outcomes.  Toddlers cannot run a receiving pattern at all.  And they cannot hold a block long enough for their toddler-quarterback to get a decent pass off.  And if you’re the 1985 Chicago Bears™, what’s the best thing that could happen?  You beat a bunch of toddlers.  I mean, it’s fun and all, but it’s hardly a greater achievement than defeating the Dallas Cowboys© or a school for ten-year-old girls that lisp.

A goal is required for good mental health.  The very best goals require that you work at your limits, pushing yourself to become better.  They’re goals that you believe you can achieve.  And they’re goals where you can see a path to make them become real.  And the best part of the goal is at the end, after you’ve achieved it, if you plan ahead you’ve got another goal waiting.

hooter

One of the waitresses at Hooters® lost a leg in a car accident last week.  She now has a job at IHOP™.

As I mentioned in Wednesday’s post (Playing The Game, And Goals For Life) I had goals, just not work-related goals.  I’ve been working to create some, and I’m not there yet.  That’s okay.  The goals have to be meaningful.  And I’m not working without a net – I have sufficient goals out in front of me that even if I couldn’t work out a work goal, I have plenty of others.  Is having a cup of fresh, hot coffee a good goal?  Dangit.  Back to the drawing board.

So, what about these great men who had everything when they accomplished the goals of a lifetime?

Patton’s uncharacteristic self-pity in the quote from his diary was the result of his achievement – the war was won, and he contributed to the Allied victory on the Western Front.  He had fame.  Only 11 men had ever had a higher rank in the military.  From what I read about Patton, I’m willing to bet that he would have been able to channel himself into a post-war United States without too much difficulty.

Would he have been a politician?  Hard to say.  It’s unlikely that he would have the desire to speak pretty little lies just to get elected.  But you can bet one thing – if he hadn’t died, Patton would have done his level best to shake up the United States.  I wouldn’t bet against him.

And what about Buzz Aldrin?  Buzz crawled into a bottle and managed to skip most of the 1970’s.  Admittedly, that wasn’t a bad decade to skip since not having a memory of the Bee Gees® is something some people would pay for.  At some point I believe that he managed to come to a truce with the Moon.  He decided to instead focus on making money for himself and to be a spokesman for his cause:  “Get your ass to Mars®.”  Is being a celebrity spokesmodel as exciting as going to the frikking Moon?  Certainly not.  But you might as well be comfortable if you flew to the frikking Moon.

buzzmars

Buzz Aldrin sadly got divorced in the 1970’s.  Apparently his wife needed space, too.

But Hans Gruber got it wrong.  Plutarch actually wrote:

Alexander wept when he heard from Anaxarchus that there was an infinite number of worlds; and his friends asking him if any accident had befallen him, he returns this answer:  “Do you not think it a matter worthy of lamentation that when there is such a vast multitude of them, we have not yet conquered one?”

In this case, Alexander is saying the exact opposite of the Hans Gruber quote – that he had a goal to conquer an entire world, but wept because his dream wasn’t yet complete.  The moral of the story?

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Maybe if Hans knew his Plutarch better he might have not fallen off the Nakatomi Plaza Tower.

Health Goals, Girls in Togas (and a Bikini)

“Trying is the first step toward failure.” – The Simpsons

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I want to get my face on a coin – that way I achieve my goal to help make change in the world.

One thing that I’ve decided to focus on even more in 2020 is my health.  Even if I followed all of Dr. Sinclair’s advice (Living Forever, The Uncomfortable Way), I’m still getting older although my immortality is working out so far.  In some respects I think that we might be in for some very interesting times in the next few years, so being in better shape than I am now would probably be a good idea.  Besides, as Pugsley gets older, taller, and stronger if I don’t do something he’ll wake up one morning and say, “I’m going to break you, little man.”

One way to do that is to keep my life under constant review.  This isn’t new, at all.  The Romans may be dead, but I contend that Roman philosophy dating from the first century A.D. is valid today.  Heck, current American civilization looks a lot like Roman life around that time.  In reading Seneca’s Letters, I saw a conversation where he described checking into a hotel, looking down from the room at the fitness gym next door.  A little later he described that the Romans had regulations on boat speeds in particular areas.  It was like California, but only 30% of the population in Rome were slaves.

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Romans on diets were happy when their togas went from L to XL. 

In particular, one of my favorite philosophers of the first century was Seneca.  Seneca was a stoic, but had managed to make a considerable fortune open a chain of all-night toga laundromats.  It was there that the togas were washed with water from the sea tides.  Occasionally, a batch of this water would get too stiff from the added starch used to flatten the togas so they weren’t wrinkled.  That’s where the Roman expression, “beware the tides of starch” comes from.

Okay, but what Seneca really said was:

“I will keep constant watch over myself and will put each day up for review.  For this is what makes us evil, that none of us looks back upon our own lives.  We reflect only upon what we are about to do.  Yet, our plans for the future descend from the past.”

– Seneca

Before I read that particular passage, I had bought a little Moleskine® notebook for just that purpose.  When I said, little, I mean it.  It’s really small – just a little larger than a 3×5 notecard.  It’s small enough I can fit it in my wallet.  I bought it for a very specific purpose:  to reflect on progress towards my goals, specifically my health related goals for 2020.

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Her parents even named her Annette.

Each day I write down several things:  how much and what I ate – if I ate anything (The Last Weight Loss Advice You’ll Ever Need, Plus a Girl in a Bikini Drinking Water), how much I exercised, what weights I lifted and how many repetitions, my morning and evening weight, and whether or not I felt that aliens had put pods near my house that would turn into an exact duplicate of me if I dared fall asleep.  Those are a few of the things that go into the book, though not all of the things I put down.  It doesn’t take particularly long to write it down – just two or three minutes.

I find, for me, the process of writing this data down makes it more real somehow.  And it makes me jump on the scale on days I’d rather not (like after Thanksgiving) so I can get the data.  And collecting that data and writing it down is important.  It makes me face the cold, hard objective truth and holds me accountable in an equally objective manner.

So, I record what I’ve done, and how I’ve lived as it relates to my goals.  When I’m fasting, I write about that progress.  I also record how much I’ve slept, because even though I know that sleep is no substitute for caffeine, I also know that I’m probably not sleeping enough – though I would say that the passengers in my car seem to get unreasonably angry when I try to take a short nap.  “Are you trying to kill us?” they ask.

Worrywarts.  The road is practically straight.

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Sometimes I wake up grumpy – other mornings I let her sleep in.

Writing those experiences and activities down also help me celebrate victories – and holds me accountable for lapses.  It also sets up a feedback loop.  Nothing makes the next lunchtime session on the treadmill more focused than seeing that I gained weight the last week.  But present me certainly doesn’t want to make life worse for future me by setting future me up for a failure.  Writing things down changes outcomes.  I certainly don’t want to write down failures.  I mean, one time someone told me I tended to blame others for my failures.  He was right.  I guess I get that from my mother.

But in reviewing the past, and in reviewing my failures, I don’t, and won’t use past failures as a club.  I don’t allow them to poison my future.  Instead, I use failure as a lever.  Since I caused the failure in the first place, more than likely I can solve it.  Unless it involves communism.  Then you’re on your own – you should have seen the red flags.

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I’m hoping Kim declares war on his real enemy:  Twinkies®.

I also use this time to reflect on the things I did to take me towards my goals, and the things I did that take me away from them.  It sounds overly simplistic, but most people would be far healthier if they just made several small changes each day about what they eat, how much they work out, how much sleep they get, and what is the appropriate amount to pay for a hooker in Tijuana*.  $3.50 is probably a little low.

Weakness is powerful, so having to write down every time I make an error is one way make me more powerful.  It also strengthens the cause and effect relationship between my action and the outcome.  This further makes me accountable.  Dangit.

In a sense, this is (sort of) a sequel or companion piece to Wednesday (Focus is a Key to Life and Look a Squirrel!), and ties to focus.  You can have a plan, but if you don’t collect data and don’t analyze it regularly, you’ll never focus on it – it’ll be like an objective your boss gives you and then never mentions again – it simply will never get done.

  • If you write about it, you will focus on it.
  • If you measure it, you will manage it.
  • If your ego is against it, you’ll never measure it.

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“I’m a failure – I can’t even fake the death of a stripper.” 

I heard an interview with Penn Gillette, the Penn part of the illusionist duo Penn and Teller.  He was talking about his recent weight loss.  He mentioned what he thought his starting weight was, but then added, “I really don’t know how much I weighed at my heaviest, no one does.”  What he was stating is that his ego wouldn’t let him step on the scale at that higher weight – he simply didn’t want to know that answer.  It wasn’t until he’d started losing weight that his ego allowed him to start measuring.

And start managing.  And start tracking.

And start winning.

*I have never been to Tijuana, but I saw a Cheech and Chong movie once where the plot involved them making a van out of marijuana in Tijuana, so I feel I have some expertise.

Focus is a Key to Life and Look a Squirrel!

“Maybe we’re at war with Norway?” – The Thing

norway

The Norwegians have the best parties – Fjord Fiestas, you could call them.

You’ve been there.

There’s a state where you experience full awareness.  But it’s full awareness of a very specific kind.  There is no past.  There is no future.  There is only now – the immediate now.  You cease to be aware of anything but what you are doing.

You have become a verb.  You are lost in the moment.  You are the moment.

This state transcends time.  Minutes, hours can pass.  It seems like an instant.

This state has a name.  It’s not tequila.

It’s focus.  But tequila is a close second.

When I was in athletics in high school, coaches would tell me to “focus.”  That was it.  I think they told me that because they knew focus was important, and or maybe because that was what they were told when they were in high school.  But they could see the impact that focus had on an athlete in a game, or a wrestler in a match.  The difference between a focused player and one that isn’t focused is . . . sorry, what was I saying?

Anyway.

distracted

Well, the string certainly looks alive when it’s on a bikini.

What advice did we get with the command to focus?  Well, in my case, none.  I was expected to figure it out.  I drilled takedowns in wrestling hundreds of times.  Tackling drills for football?  Again, at least hundreds of repetitions.  Sprints?  I think I did thousands of those, or at least it felt like thousands after practice was over.

How much time did they my coaches spend on teaching us focus and mental preparation?

Umm, I just told you.  They told us to be focused.  That’s it.

And I’m not complaining, some of the coaches were outstanding by any definition, and in one case objectively the best coach in the history of the state where I grew up in his sport.  I don’t know, maybe they all thought that focus was second nature to some people.  And maybe it is.  But not to me.  I get distracted by something as small as a bikini.  Heck, if I had a dollar for every time I got distracted, I wish I had a beer.

Gradually, I figured it out, or at least figured it out as best as I could.  Fast forward to this weekend:  I caught myself telling Pugsley to focus before a wrestling match.  I had a moment of epiphany.  What does focus even mean to a kid whose entire life has been distorted by the distraction of technology?  How do you even describe it?  Maybe, perhaps, I could help him figure it out after his batteries died.

aztec

How many Aztecs does it take to change a lightbulb?  None.  The Aztec Empire dissolved hundreds of years before the lightbulb was invented.  For some reason my kids don’t like my lightbulb jokes.

It’s true that in our lives, physical preparation in athletics or training for work often takes precedence for the mental preparation for what we do.  The physical preparation is easy to see.  It’s easy to objectively measure.  How many pushups can you do in one minute?  At work, the training for the job can be measured in certificates and completed coursework and compiled grades.  And don’t ask candidates to prove how many pushups they can do in one minute no matter how amusing you think that might be.  Have them do something like wax your car instead.

But mental preparation is tougher.  You can’t directly see it.  But yet it’s crucial to performance in nearly everything we do.

In athletics, the mind must be ready for the task at hand.  If you’re wrestling, you’re going to war.  You’re preparing to try to spend the next six minutes making the other guy regret he ever stepped on the mat with you.  A bad place to be is to focus on what can go wrong before a match.  A better place is to focus on the moment – to understand that no matter what happens, there is a way.

If I focus on what happens if I lose, I will wrestle not to lose.  If I live life focused on what could go wrong, I will live life not to lose.  My entire life would be spent in damage control, defending against failures that may not even exist.

focus

Whoa!  This is most excellent and triumphant!

The solution is focus.  I wasn’t born with it.  But focus can be taught.  There’s even John Wilder’s Patented Focus List®, presented below with only limited commercial interruption thanks to a generous sponsorship by the MacArthur Foundation™ (hint, hint, I’m still waiting for my #GeniusGrant).

  • Know what you want. This is basic, but yet there are hundreds of people walking around who don’t know what they want out of life.  In sports, it’s easier – people want to win.  Some more than ever.  But we’ll talk more about that next Wednesday.
  • Believe that it’s possible. I had a boss that was exceptional at this.  He often had more belief in me than I had in myself.  But if you don’t believe that what you’re doing can be done, you’ll find ways to make sure that you’re right.  Plus believing it’s not possible is one way of making an excuse for failure before you start.  Heck, most things are impossible, right up until someone does them.  But enough about me losing my virginity.
  • Know every second counts. Clocks are unrelenting.  0:00 is coming.  Every second that passes without you taking action is a second that can never come back.
  • Give everything, right from the start. Closely tied to using every second, is using every bit of you for every second.  It’s your force multiplied by your time that is your momentum.

calc

See, it’s so simple a fifth grader could derive it.

  • Prepare relentlessly. That means working through every detail you can, and as close to the real thing as possible.  I guarantee your opponent is.  Well, one of them is.  When his iPhone® battery is dead.
  • Focus on winning, not losing. Reasons eloquently established above.

ccamp

Too soon?

  • Lock out distractions. Everyday life tends to intrude in your brain.  Push it back.  Like an ex-wife it will be there after you’re done.
  • Avoid feeding your ego. Your ego, that part of you that holds all of your self-importance?  The ego that thinks that people remember silly mistakes you made?  It will fight with everything it has to be protected – it will sabotage you to prevent you doing your best.  Sure, in rare circumstances people will remember your silly mistake (putting hydrogen in that dirigible, for instance), but that’s not the norm.
  • Have confidence in yourself.
  • Have faith. I’ve been lucky time and time again.  I know the old saying that “luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity” – but that was the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca who said that.  And where is Seneca, hmm?
  • Remember why you’re here – not a specific way to win, but to win.
  • Focus on now, not the next game. Nor the next match.  Nor the ride home.
  • Use your tension to build focus. Being nervous is okay, and can, if used properly help your preparation.
  • Use music. There is nothing that so impacts emotion and sets mood than music.  Good rock music helps a workout.  Appropriately aggressive music helps focus – Come Out And Play by the Offspring, or Electric Worry by Clutch or even Shoot to Thrill by AC/DC come to mind.  Please feel free to suggest your favorite music that psyches you up below.  I promise not to make too much fun of your choice, unless you pick something like Madonna or Justin Bieber.  Yes, that includes that odious little man, Phil Collins.  He knows what he did.
  • Have a routine, once you get it right. Play the same songs every time.  Play them in the same order.  Spend the same amount of time warming up each time.
  • Be ready physically. We’ve spent all this time getting your mind ready.  It would be a shame if your body weren’t ready, too.
  • Have a strategy. Execute it.  Having a strategy is important.  Having the courage to execute it is important, too.  Will it have to be sufficiently broad to account for surprises?    But why do you have to bring broads into it?
  • Don’t deviate from the strategy too soon. There may be a time to give up on your plan, but it’s not immediately.  Unless it is.  This is more of an art – there is absolutely a time when Plan A will fail, and you’re stuck with Plan B.  Or Plan C.

Okay, I never said it was a short list.

One other piece of advice:  Be as outcome independent as you can be.  The poem If by Rudyard Kipling makes this point well (The Chinese Farmer, Kipling, Marcus Aurelius, and You). Winning everything you try, every time you do it is impossible for everyone.  But after the victory or the loss, you will remain.  Yes, losing sucks.  But the outcome of any specific event in your life is much less important than the input that got you there, which is (more or less) something Seneca also said.

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I swear, I got lost for 20 minutes looking at Bill and Ted related information while writing this post.  The Internet is the devil.

Yes, you read that right.  You can’t control every outcome.  But you can control your attitude.  You can control your effort.  You can control a large part of your preparations.  You can control the virtue of your actions.  If you do all that and still lose?

Winning is still better than losing.  Winning is always better than losing.  Losing sucks, and you should never really be proud of it – it will become a habit.  But look for the lessons you can pick up for next time.

More next Wednesday when we look at how this impacts the rest of your life.

(And don’t forget to leave your psyche up to be aggressive music suggestions in the comments.)

Status, Money, and Bad Car Jokes

“Dude, where’s my car?” – Dude, Where’s My Car?

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I wonder if her Tiffany is twisted, too?

I recall reading a story about several wives at a kid’s soccer game in Dallas.  They were comparing cars – each of them had a new Mercedes® or similar luxury car.  One of the wives, exasperated, mentioned their really wealthy friend, Martha, who drove around in an older car.  “I wish I was as rich as Martha.  Then I wouldn’t have to drive a new car.”

It’s always fascinated me that there are people who feel that they have to spend money for appearances.  The Mrs. can vouch for that – it’s because of her vocal insistence that I spend money for deodorant, which I guess is like a Mercedes™, except Old Spice© is cheaper and costs much less to insure.

I know, I know, having to spend money to impress people is not a club I want to be in, but I find it interesting nevertheless.  After all, I’m in an even more exclusive club:  guys who want to be able to buy a pickup with a stick shift, a vinyl bench seat and rubber flooring instead of carpet.  As nearly as I can tell from the domestic pickup truck market, this particular club has one member.  Me.

The world seems to have gone into a mode that is based in luxury.  A few years ago, I visited a friend, Dave.  Dave had a new pickup truck.  As we drove around on a fairly warm day, I noticed that my butt was getting . . . cold.  That’s not something that normally happens to my butt by itself.  It turns out his pickup truck didn’t have just have heated seats, it had climate controlled seats that also got cold.

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I’m sure it has seats that cook you at 350°F or freeze you to -40°F.

I was amused – I didn’t even know that such a thing existed.  I hadn’t had my butt chilled for my pleasure before, except for that one time in Amsterdam.  Dave, however, didn’t buy the pickup because he was showing off or because he wanted specifically to chill my butt – he bought it because he wanted it.  And he probably paid cash.

Just kidding.  Dave probably wrote a check.

I wasn’t jealous of Dave’s truck.  It wasn’t something that I’d ever buy for myself.  My current daily driver is older than Pugsley, and has nearly 180,000 miles (3,500 kilograms) on it, and only 36,000 miles (45°C) on the latest oil change.  I’m wanting to keep it until it’s driven at least one light-second, which is 186,000 miles (63 meters).  Fingers crossed.  But I’m pretty sure I won’t get my car to the Moon – that’s 226,000 miles (5 liters), and I’m nearly certain my fuel pump will die again before then, plus Allstate® won’t insure translunar travel, I mean, at least not with full coverage.

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I’m sorry.  I Apollo-gize.  And, yes, I know that Neil never had a sweet ride like this one.

I’m not against spending money, but I think you should spend money like Fuzzy Pink Niven (Hugo® winning author Larry Niven’s wife) spends calories:

Potato chips, candy, whipped cream, or a hot fudge sundae may involve you, your dietician, your wardrobe, and other factors. But FP’s Law implies: Don’t eat soggy potato chips, or cheap candy, or fake whipped cream, or an inferior hot fudge sundae.

I think that advice on calories applies to many areas of life.  I have a budget of money.  There are things I have to buy, and have to spend it on – The Mrs. gets rather cranky if I don’t feed her.  Beyond those necessities, with any left over, I have a choice as to what I spend it on, and when I spend it.  Where Dave chooses to spend his on a really cool pickup truck, and a collection of pinball machines, my choices are different.

But those choices are mine, just like Dave’s choices are his.

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My ideal truck, complete with DIY garage!

Money represents potential.  It is the potential to create, the potential to build, the potential to serve.   In many ways, it represents the potential for future choices.

Time represents the potential for future choices as well.  We choose how to spend our money as if it is limited, but we choose to spend our time as if it’s unlimited?  Money comes and goes, but my budget of time is my life, measured in minutes and seconds.  Spending my time is nothing less than spending my life.  Just like a pickup seat determines how warm or cold our butts are, how we spend our time (and who we spend our time with) determines who we are.

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Is it just me or does this picture of Beto O’Rourke look just a bit off?

Knowing this, go and make your choices today.

Because my butt is warm.  (That’s supposed to be motivational.)

A Texas Church, Aesop, and the Future of Freedom

“I’m the plumber.  I’m just hanging around in case something goes wrong with her pipes.  (to audience) That’s the first time I’ve used that joke in twenty years.” – Horsefeathers

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“Why a four-year-old child could understand this report.  Run out and find me a four-year-old child.  I can’t make head or tail out of it.”

In a Texas church this weekend, the worst nightmare of the Left happened.  The only thing that could have been worse for the Left would have been a video of Bernie Sanders spending his own money.  A good guy with a gun (Jack Wilson) stopped a bad guy with a gun.  Part of what made it bad for the Left:  clear video evidence showed a good guy taking down a bad guy with a single shot.  To make it even worse for the Left:  the bad guy was a killer, shooting a pair of grandfatherly looking men in a room filled with grandma and grandpa types.

It was quick.  From the time the bad guy pulled his gun to the time the bad guy ceasing to . . . be was five seconds.  Five short seconds.  This was, perhaps, a final blow for the Left.  The idea that the police, who arrived very quickly (four minutes or less) should be the only ones with guns evaporated, especially since two church members were dead within three seconds.  A very well-trained citizen saved lives – how many we’ll thankfully not know, since he acted.

Not a cop.  A citizen.

Every Leftist commenter on the web that was trying to justify gun control in the wake of this tragedy couldn’t do so without defending the shooter as being somehow justified in wanting to rob the church.  The biggest problem in the eyes of the Left, perhaps, is that the churchgoers weren’t sufficiently Christian enough to quietly line up to be shot.  Texas is probably not the state for that.

What made the difference is that the good guy was able to ignore disbelief at the situation occurring right in front of him, and was able to react.  How could Jack Wilson do this?  He didn’t know exactly what threat he was going to face.  He didn’t even know if there ever was even going to be a threat.  But yet, he trained.  Dare I say it?  He was prepped.

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Ok, Zoomer.  (For the record, I’m neither.  I just like stirring things up.)

Jack Wilson scanned the churchgoers.  He was looking for data points.  He saw them and acted.

This week, Aesop over at The Raconteur Report posted his 2019 Quincy Adams Wagstaff Lecture.  It’s here (LINK).  RTWT.  As usual, Aesop writes excellent material – not only to ponder upon, but to act upon.  There are many wonderful points in it, and here is the opening:

Wherever you’re reading this, you’ve had unmistakable evidence that things aren’t going to go all rosy.  Perhaps ever again.  Perhaps just for a long dark winter of the soul, and/or of the entire civilization. There has been more than one Dark Age period in human history, and they will happen again.  You may very well get to see this firsthand, and experience life amidst it.  Howsoever long or briefly.

You’ve had a respite of some 37 months to get your metaphysical crap together in one bag, and use the time prudently.

If you’ve squandered that lead time, woe unto you.

This post made me think, which is dangerous.  At least that’s what my therapist says.  My therapist who says I’m “mentally creative” and “reality impaired.”  Thankfully, she’s imaginary, which really lowers her billing rate.  But what that post made me think most about was:

Mindset.

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This is what would happen if my imaginary therapist talked to The Mrs.  It’s funnier if you read the whole thing in a pirate voice, really.

Aesop mentions mental readiness, and that’s key.  The last 37 months have been, to put it mildly, an indication that we are headed towards a very uncertain future as the culture around us continues to polarize, as the monetary debt we face (all over the world) continues to mount, as soccer is still taken seriously as an international sport rather than a game for attention challenged three-year-olds, and as the international stability that was so hard won with the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War dissolves.

I’m not trying to sell you on any one future, on any one fate, unless there’s money in it.  But I am trying to emphasize the start of your salvation:  your mindset.  If you believe that the world will continue in an unbroken, linear stream, I can assure you that you’re wrong.  We’ve had the precursor warnings of 9/11 and the Great Recession.  If I am correct, this decade will bring tumult of a similar, if not greater magnitude.

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Evacuate the women and children first!  Then we can solve this in silence.

You should believe this, too.  Not on a surface level.  This is a mindset.  Your daily decisions should take these future unknown and unknowable calamities into account.  Why?

Because if I’m right, and you’re prepared a week, a month, or five years before you need to be, you win.  Also?  Society wins, because the more people that are prepared, the better we come through the next crisis/shock.  If we were all prepared, a hurricane could hit the shore and the stores would still be full.  When we prepare, we manage to make sure there will be less stress on the system during an emergency.

The other way to help is with skills, and the longer the crisis, the more important those skills will be.  And, no, your experience in saving the Princess® in Super Mario Brothers™ doesn’t count.  At least my therapist says it won’t.  Real skills provide for a basic human need, like food.  During the Great Depression, people gardened and farms weren’t big factory affairs – they were much smaller Mom and Pop style farms.  Even though there was significant malnutrition, starvation deaths in the United States were minimal.

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He said his New Year’s resolution was 1920×1080.

More evidence?

One of the biggest enemies of seeing reality is seeing the world you think should be, not the world as it really is.  People look at Antifa® rioting and think, “They should be arrested.”  They aren’t.  What does that data point tell you?

The government of Virginia is threatening to take semi-automatic guns, dedicate a team to confiscating guns and the government should allow honest, law abiding citizens to exercise the right to self-protection.  But the government wants to take it away and make honest people felons.  What does that data point tell you?

Government debt today is at 106% of GDP.  During the worst of the Great Depression, debt was less than 50% of the GDP.  During the height of the Vietnam War?  Debt was less than 40%.  What does that data point tell you?

I can’t promise the cause of the next crisis.  But I can promise that it’s coming.  Cultivate the mindset.  It’s the first step.

The key is to avoid despair even though you see the world as it really is.

“I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today.  I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet.  I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it.” – Marcus Aurelius Groucho Marx

I have been accused of being too cheerful from time to time throughout my life.  And I plead guilty – with a smile on my face.  Why?

First – I’m naturally an optimist.  I want to achieve the best, but I also know that there’s no fixed way the world should be.  There is just the way that the world really is today.  If I don’t let myself get upset at the difference between an ideal and reality, I sleep a lot better.  Does that mean I’m satisfied?  No.  I work with every fiber to change some things for the better, but I don’t let it wreck my life like a pink-hatted blue-haired creature of fluid gender when confronted with a person who had to ask what their gender pronouns are.

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The first two hours are rough.  Caffeine is my best morning friend.

Second – Life has been awesome for me.  I can think of a LOT of times that I thought it was ruined.  But each of those times resulted in a situation that was pretty good for me.  Am I worth $30 million dollars?  No.  But that’s probably for the better.  If I had that kind of scratch I’d probably make Elon Musk look like the model of public restraint.

Third – I’ll admit, there was a time (about a year ago) where I got a little gloomy myself. But as I looked around me, I looked at what we have done.  I realized that freedom has won here in the United States for hundreds of years against all odds.

There were 2.5 million people living in the 13 colonies in 1776.  That’s less than the population of Utah.  In that 2.5 million we had a Washington, a Franklin, a Jefferson.  Sure, Franklin in 1789 might have drank more than the state of Utah in 1989 all by himself, but there are men that are the equal to our founders, and they exist in every state.  You know they exist, too.  The tricorn hats and powdered wigs are a dead giveaway.

Always remember that there is a line.  If you look at them standing along the church pews, scanning the congregation to keep them safe, they look nice.

Heck, they are nice.  Until they cross the line.

Then they’re not nice.  Then they become good men.

So, to gently change Groucho:  The past we wish to cling to is dead.  The present that we have is generally not so bad.  And we have a future, even if we can only see it dimly now, even if its golden age is years or decades away.

Let us go and make it.

Dare To Live Your Life And Scarring My Children For Life

“Now it was serious:  a double-dog-dare.  What else was there but a triple dare you?  And then, the coup de grace of all dares, the sinister triple-dog-dare.” – A Christmas Story

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Which is more daring, a pebble or a stick?  The pebble:  it’s a little boulder.

Almost 2,500 years ago, Thucydides said, “luck favors the daring.”  Thucydides is dead, so, really, what did he know anyway?  But part of being young is being daring – it’s on the label.  There are so many things that you know, especially things that aren’t so.  Life hasn’t yet given you curve balls and unexpected experiences

The lessons that you can learn from unexpected experiences can be helpful ones.  The first lesson I was ever taught in high school chemistry lab was:  “cold glass looks exactly like hot glass.”  The second lesson was “never trust a naked man selling slightly used sulfuric acid, you can never tell where the acid has been.”

But the biggest loss is when we let one bad experience create fear in our lives.  Let me explain:  One time when we were getting firewood back when we lived in Alaska, Five Year Old The Boy was tromping in the forest.  While jumping up and down on a little hill (five year old kids do that), The Boy managed to stir up a group of wasps that had burrowed into the ground there.  All of them, and I mean all of them, came out of the nest and swarmed The Boy like Japanese jets on Godzilla©, all while The Boy flapped his arms like Greta Thunberg™ on tweaking on meth.

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I would pay money to watch Greta in Marine boot camp – I’m sure the D.I. would nicely tell her, “As soon as you’re done getting your beauty sleep, princess, GET OFF OF MY OBSTACLE COURSE!”

After The Boy yelled “How dare you!” at the wasps, they left, because that technique always works.  The Mrs. and I calmed him down, and treated the bites.  The experience, however, was enough that The Boy was pretty scared of wasps – and there were a lot of them in Fairbanks that year.

So, one day after we had moved to Texas, we were in the backyard and just like in a cartoon, a beautiful butterfly had flown right up to The Boy.

“What is it?”  There were butterflies in Alaska, but none that was as amazing as this one.

“It’s a butterfly,” I responded.  His eyes lit up as he smiled at the colorful, delicate wings.  “They bite,” I added.  I had, of course, forgotten about The Boy being surrounded by wasps like ice weasels on a cheese wheel.  The Boy had not.

The Boy ran into the house, screaming.  The Mrs., who had observed every second, was not pleased.

Yes.  This really happened.  I made my son run screaming from a butterfly, so you know I had “Father of the Year” pretty much in the bag after that back in 2007.

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SJW means Social Justice Wasp?  Hmm.  Wasps have about the same temperament as Antifa©, but at least the wasps have jobs.

But there are many things in life where the first experience wasn’t great, but like The Boy’s fear of butterflies, you’ve learned the wrong lesson if you avoid butterflies because of wasps.  Mark Twain said it well:

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid.  She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again and that is well, but also she will never sit on a cold one anymore.

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Twain had to work out – he was constantly on the run later on in his life after assassinating Abraham Lincoln.  He also never wore shirts – he didn’t believe in concealed weapons.

Receivers in the game of football have to have a short memory – after coming across the middle, being hit by a linebacker at a combined velocity of 40 miles per hour, you’d never run another route again if you kept that in mind.  They even have a phrase that describes receivers who are jittery – they say they are “hearing footsteps” – they’re more concerned about being hit than playing the game.

And me – I had to have a short memory as well.  I’ve heard that Samuel Johnson said that a second marriage “is the triumph of hope over experience,” and that’s right.  It is.  And if I had spent too much time overthinking it?  I’d never have married The Mrs.

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Hmm.  Dr. Lechter Says.  New feature?

I think the key is optimism and a sense of confidence that the future will be okay.  I think that’s why older folks sometimes stop taking risks – they’ve had such a large number of experiences that they can see sixteen ways something that can go wrong.  A teenager learning to drive, however, sees no way to lose.  It’s only after experience that caution comes into play.

When was the last time you gave up an opportunity because you felt that it was too risky?  When was the last time you decided not to take a vacation because the last one was bad?  The minute you stop living in your life, taking risks, and knowing that the future will take care of itself, you’re dead even if you’re still breathing.

I think that most of the mistakes people make is in not being bold enough.  There is an advantage to trying, especially trying things you don’t know how to do.  Mark Twain said it well:

There are some things that can beat smartness and foresight.  Awkwardness and stupidity can.  The best swordsman in the world doesn’t need to fear the second best swordsman in the world.  No, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before.  He doesn’t do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn’t prepared for him.  He does the thing he ought not to do and often it catches the expert out and ends him on the spot.

So, in your life, you have one shot.  Do you want to regret not doing something in twenty years?  Come on – join me.  Convince all the grade school kids that butterflies bite.  Bonus points if you convince them that butterflies produce deadly poisons*.

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This may be the most Australian picture ever, but I’ll defer to Adam (LINK) and Tom (LINK).

*Not applicable in Australia, where literally everything wants to kill you, and even ladybugs can leap seven feet and have venom-tipped spikes for legs.

Bonus unrelated content – JP on Epstein:

Why Character Just Might Be A Better Indicator Of Marriage Stability Than What Her Butt Looks Like

“Just because you are a character doesn’t mean that you have character.” – Pulp Fiction

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When the bugman began to hate . . .

There was a time after She Who Will Not Be Named was forever banished from Stately Wilder Manor, but before I met The Mrs.  Yes, your host, the John Wilder was single.  Can you believe I didn’t beat the ladies off with a stick?  I mean, the restraining order and all . . . well . . . the less said about that the better.

There was one particular woman who had caught my attention.  One evening, I introduced her to my friend who I’ll call Jim, mainly because his name is Jim.  Oops – I think I’ve said too much.  Now everyone will know who he is.  If only Jim weren’t such a rare name!

“What did you think?” I asked Jim.

Ever the good friend, Jim said, and this is an exact quote:  “What do you two have in common besides your eyes and her butt?”

They say that for a statement to really hurt, it has to be true.  Jim had delivered the Atomic Wedgie of Truth®.  He was, of course, correct.  And you should be so lucky to have friends that will tell you the truth as bluntly and completely as Jim.  The relationship between the woman’s butt and my eyes ended soon thereafter.

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A friend of mine went to the hospital because of a wedgie – sadly, he was diagnosed with Stage 4 dorkiness.

Not only is character important in dating, it was pretty important to a company I worked for once upon a time:  I was one of the employees lucky enough to be trained in behavior-based interviewing.  The basic idea of behavior-based interviewing is that people, like the official results of Jeffery Epstein’s autopsy, don’t change very much.  Therefore, the best way to get an actual prediction of the candidate’s future behavior is to understand the candidate’s past behavior.  Then we were taught how to interview so they would share relevant situations so we could understand the candidate really well.

If the interview technique is done right, it doesn’t feel like an interview, it feels like casual conversation.

I was horrible in my first few interviews, as in scaring the candidate because he thought the company hired robotic androids that only appeared to be human.  Thankfully, there was a feedback system from the candidates, and my boss gave me some tips based on it.  He told me that it was okay to blink and breathe while conducting an interview, and that wouldn’t be perceived by the candidate as weakness.  I took a risk that he was right, and the candidates stopped shaking so much during the interviews.  I guess staring unblinkingly directly into their eyes nonstop during the interview is a bit creepy, so I allowed myself no fewer than three blinks per minute.

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I really messed up this interview.  They asked me if I was a people person.  I answered, “Yes!  I am a people!  Or is they go great with mustard a better answer?”

But if you do anything several hundred times, you can get pretty good at it unless you’re Nicholas Cage acting in a movie.  It (really) did bug the candidates that I could take notes without looking down at my notepad.  It’s not a great superpower, but I decided to keep that quirk going, since it was a sign of dominance that I could use to weed out the weak.  And I eventually ended up interviewing hundreds of new graduate applicants – heck, I even used the behavior-based interviewing techniques on The Mrs. the night we met to see if she had any of the character, um, difficulties that led to the untimely departure of She Who Will Not Be Named.

The Mrs. didn’t have those flaws.

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So, on one blind date the girl said she was a huge country fan.  Me:  “Well, I like Russia, too.”

The thing that surprised me the most was that interviewees would tell me the most incredible things – like how they’d lied to people.  How they’d stolen from their employer.  How much they felt the world was out to get them.  By the way, if you lived in Fayetteville, Arkansas in 1998 and never figured out who shaved your pig, dyed it blue, and dressed it like Dolly Parton, I think I might know the guy that did it.  Don’t worry – he told me it was mostly consensual.  Except for the perfume.

The interviewing system was based almost entirely around character.  The company I was working for considered good character the most important factor in what constituted a good employee.  More than once I heard, “You can teach a good person to do their job, but you can’t teach a bad person to be good,” from my boss.  Then he’d shake his head and look at me with a sad, defeated expression on his face.  Of course I didn’t blink.  I had to show him the respect due the alpha of the pack.

But there were employees who actually possessed good character there, too.  As an example, one employee I know was attempting to find some financial information that was relevant to his job.  Somehow in working through the company computer network he stumbled upon the check writing software.

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Thankfully the money is headed her way from that Nigerian prince. 

Yes.  My friend found the software that would have allowed him to write himself a check for $50,000,000.  No human would have seen the check – it would have been printed on company check stock, signed with a dot-matrix signature, popped in the mail, and delivered directly to my friend’s house.  The company had billions (really) in the bank.  It wouldn’t have been immediately caught.

My friend called me over and showed it to me.  It was a moment I was in awe.  This company had huge piles of money in various bank accounts.  I realized that just a few keystrokes could end up making my friend an overnight millionaire, at least until the audit found a few missing millions.  In a situation that would tempt some people, my friend calmly picked up the phone, called accounting, and let them know they had a really big problem.  And he didn’t do it from a beach in Brazil while sipping some drink that comes with an umbrella.  But not flaming.  That’s for tourists.

That’s good character.

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Climate science has taught us that science demands seriousness.

The company actually had a list of traits they were looking for.  What did they consider good character?  Humility was on the list, as was honesty and a few other things people generally think are representative of virtue, as I wrote about Kardashians, Hairy Bikinis, Elvis, Wealth, and Virtue.  There are a lot of things that change about people, but absent a significant psychological event (and sometimes not even then), their character doesn’t change.

That brings me to this statement:  the most important part of parenting is helping to build character.  I think I’ve established that character is important, so when is it important?

I think that the primary focus of parenthood is guiding children through one critical age range:  middle school, from the ages of around 11 to, say, 14.  Did you go to grade school with someone who was pretty cool, only to watch them become a complete dirtbag in high school?  I know I did, and the time that they went downhill was in middle school.

The ages of 11 to 14 are where kids are first practicing at being adults, and are in the process of crystallizing the character that will define them for the rest of their lives.  They’re understanding being really hurt and rejected for the first time, how to deal with defeat.  What love is.  What their values are.  How to deal with victory.  They’re understanding what true friendship and loyalty really is.  They’re finally (thankfully) understanding what deodorant is, though generally just a few weeks too late.

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Knowing how to relate to Pugsley is everything.

And they’re deciding if they want to reject virtue and turn to the Dark Side© evil.  Sorry, but Disney® has trademarked that phrase, along with all jokes related to mice, intellectual property abuse, and and ducks.  And, yes, I understand that some percentage, say 70%, of character is flat-out genetic in nature.  There are families of dirtbags that have been dirtbags for 100 years.  If you think about it, you’ll know who I’m talking about.

As I mentioned before, I even used the techniques I learned from interviewing in the blind date that eventually netted The Mrs.  When I finally took The Mrs. over to meet Jim and his family, Jim approved.  “You guys seem great for each other.”

Perhaps Seneca, writing back in 60 AD or so (back when your Momma was just 50 years old), said it best:

Each person acquires their own character, but their official roles are designated by chance.  You should invite some to your table because they are deserving, others because they may come to deserve it.”

When you are evaluating people to be your friend, your mate, or your employee, character is primary.  Great butts are secondary, in the end.

Get it?  Butts?  In the end?

I kill me.

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Success, Fight Club, Strippers and Socialists

“We have just lost cabin pressure.” – Fight Club

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The second rule of Wilder Club is if this is your first visit, you have to comment.

I had a conversation with a friend today.  Oh, sure, I hear you say, what would an iconoclastic iron-jawed individualist with a body odor redolent of medium rare ribeye (with just a hint of pepper) like John Wilder need with a friend?  I guess we all have our little weaknesses.  And dogs follow me.  Because I smell like steak.

In this particular case as with most of my friends, I’ve known this friend for years.  I’ve known most of my close friends longer than The Boy has been alive, and he’s in college now.  It’s nice.  If a day, a week, a month or a year goes by, so what?  We can still restart the conversation where we left off.  It’s as comfortable as watching a movie you’ve seen a dozen times.

I’ll make the observation that the only place where the character of people change is in a movie – almost all of my close friends have the same sense of humor and the same sense of values that they had when our friendships were forming.  Absent a significant emotional event, people are a constant.

And I like that.

There is a corresponding trust that comes with being a close friend – honesty.  That’s why when talking with my friend, I really enjoyed the chance to be honest.  Honesty is difficult because it requires that trust, because really honest criticism is hard to take, even when it comes from a friend.  Or a co-worker.  Or a relative.  Or someone you just met.  Or your UPS® delivery guy.  Oh, wait.  Most people don’t like honest.  But my friends do.

This particular friend is really in a good position in life, which seems to be a common pattern with my friends.  He has a spouse that makes more money than he does, and, in general, the household probably brings in enough cash each month so that Nigerian princes send emails to them asking for money.  They’re wealthy enough that they donate to the homeless.  This appears to be a more socially acceptable donation strategy than my “donation to the topless,” scheme.

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Yes, this is the only joke that I’ve ever seen that involves both the Greco-Roman philosophy of stoicism and stripping.  I’m sure that Seneca would be proud.

But lest ye want to class my friend as the evil, selfish, wealthy type, he’s not.  The family has a huge number of kids, and it’s a close family.  My friend is constantly taking time off to go to athletic events, and when we catch up, I can sense that the relationship he has with his kids isn’t a surface relationship – it’s genuine and deep.  I can tell, because I know people who understand genuine relationships, who listen to both sides of a family argument – my neighbors.

And yet . . . despite the wealth, despite the great family, my friend feels that there’s something missing.  He is as high as he wants to go in the company he works at – any higher and the travel demands would pull him away from family.  He’s long since mastered his job – there is little that can be thrown at him that he hasn’t seen in the last fifteen or so years.  So, his condition is one of high pay, mastery of work, and, improbably, discontent.

John Wilder:  “You realize you have an advantage that 99% of people would die for.  You’re financially secure.  You can quit your job anytime.  Literally, you could walk in to your boss this afternoon and quit.  Your lifestyle wouldn’t change a bit.”

Not Elon Musk:  “Yes.”

Unlikely Voice of Wisdom John Wilder:  “So, what is it you want to do?”

Really, I Promise It Isn’t Elon Musk:  “I need to think about it.”

Channeling Tyler Durden From Fight Club® John Wilder:  “No.  If you think about it, you’ll end up doing nothing but thinking about it.  You have to do something.  Physically start it.  This weekend.  I’ll check back on Monday to see how you did.”

There is a scene in the movie Fight Club™ where Tyler Durden holds a gun to the head of a liquor store clerk.  If you haven’t seen the movie, I strongly suggest it.  I probably watch it once a month while I write – I think there are few movies that communicate the human condition in modern life so well.

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Pugsley doesn’t miss many school days.

JACK, in voiceover:  On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.

CLERK:  Please… don’t…

TYLER DURDEN: Give me your wallet.

Tyler pulls out the driver’s license.

TYLER:  Raymond K. Hessel. 1320 SE Benning, apartment A.  A small, cramped basement apartment.

RAYMOND:  How’d you know?

TYLER:  They give basement apartments letters instead of numbers.  Raymond, you’re going to die.  Is this a picture of Mom and Dad?

RAYMOND:  Yes.

TYLER:  Your mom and dad will have to call kindly doctor so-and-so to dig up your dental records, because there won’t be much left of your face.

RAYMOND:  Please, God, no!                            

JACK: Tyler…

TYLER:  An expired community college student ID card.  What did you used to study, Raymond K. Hessel?

RAYMOND:  S-S-Stuff.

TYLER:  “Stuff.”  Were the mid-terms hard?  I asked you what you studied.

JACK:  Tell him!

RAYMOND:  Biology, mostly.

TYLER:  Why?

RAYMOND:  I… I don’t know…

TYLER:  What did you want to be, Raymond K. Hessel?

Tyler cocks the .357 magnum Colt© Python™ pointed at Raymond’s head.

TYLER:  The question, Raymond, was “what did you want to be?”

JACK:  Answer him!

RAYMOND:  A veterinarian!

TYLER:  Animals.

RAYMOND:  Yeah … animals and s-s-s —

TYLER:  Stuff.  That means you have to get more schooling.

RAYMOND:  Too much school.

TYLER:  Would you rather be dead?

RAYMOND:  No, please, no, God, no!

Tyler uncocks the gun, lowers it.

TYLER:  I’m keeping your license.  I know where you live.  I’m going to check on you.  If you aren’t back in school and on your way to being a veterinarian in six weeks, you will be dead.  Get the hell out of here.

JACK:  I feel sick.

TYLER:  Imagine how he feels.

Tyler brings the gun to his own head, pulls the trigger — click.  It’s empty.

JACK:  I don’t care, that was horrible.

TYLER:  Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessell’s life.  His breakfast will taste better than any meal he has ever eaten.

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How dare you . . . make Greta uncomfortable.

And it’s true.  I tend to think that everyone’s life would be a little better if they had Tyler Durden to be a life coach, to ever so gently coax them to be the best they can be while holding a .357 magnum Colt® Python™ to their head.  That seems to be a bit frowned upon, so that leaves my friends with me.  See how lucky you are?

In my role as Dr. Durden, I’ve noticed that there’s a problem some people have.  It’s being too clever.  It’s thinking.  How do I know?  It’s my problem that I try to compensate for by writing and doing.  If I think about doing something, it will never get done.  I keep thinking about fixing the bannister that broke when we moved in to the house a decade ago.  It’s never been high on my list, since people falling down stairs is funny, with extra points if they are really old.  But thinking about doing something never accomplishes anything.

If I plan to do it, it will get done.  Half of my time driving to and from work on a day I’m going to write a post, I’m writing it in my head, selecting jokes, thinking of themes.  It’s also spent thinking of how I’m going to connect the idea I want to share with students who might be forced to read this post when Mrs. Grundy tells them to compare and contrast my work with that poseur, Mark Twain, in high school in the year 2248 (that’s when Kirk will be a sophomore).

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Okay, generally on my drive to work I have about five or ten minutes between cars, so it would take several hours to get a group of cars behind me like that.  But a man has to have goals!

It may look like I’m driving to work, but I’m really plotting out what I’m going to write about.  To be honest, it sometimes takes both lanes to do that.  I wish the State Patrol® would be a little more understanding to artists like me.

Thankfully, The Mrs. is.

The Mrs. and I had a conversation the other night.  It may or may not have involved wine – I’m not telling unless I’ve been subpoenaed and am under oath to a House subcommittee.  Actually, it wasn’t so much a conversation as The Mrs. describing to me how she felt about this little project I publish three times a week.

I don’t make any money on this blog, though I’ve made clear since day one that can change at any time.  I have plans for several (eventual) ways to do that including adding subliminal messages causing you to want to pay for my health insurance.  It looks like it’s already worked for Bernie Sanders.

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In a socialist paradise all bloggers make $450,000 a year, right?  But I worry that for this Christmas we won’t have an Elf on a Shelf, we’ll have a Bernie on a Gurney.

No, at this point, writing is a hobby.  But it’s a hobby that takes over 20 hours a week, sometimes closer to 30 hours.  I still have a job, and I won’t stop interacting my family, so most nights I won’t even start writing before 9pm.  A lot of that time comes from time I’d normally be selfishly engaged in what you mortals call “sleep”, but a chunk of that time comes directly from time I’d be spending with The Mrs.

When I’m writing, I’m simply not available.  I’m writing.

The Mrs.:  “You know, I would certainly have an issue with the time that you spend writing, if it weren’t important.”  There was more to this, where she detailed the number of hours I spend.  But I keyed in on the word “Important.”

I was a little surprised by that.  “Important?”

The Mrs.:  “Yes.  I can see that what you’re writing about is important.  People need to hear it.  So keep doing it.”

Okay, that proves she never reads this stuff.

But as I talked more with my friend, the concept of “meaning” came up.

My Friend Who is Really Most Certainly Not Elon Musk:  “So, it’s about meaning?”

Suddenly as Wise as the Roman Philosopher Seneca John Wilder:  “That’s silly.  You don’t go off chasing ‘meaning’ in your life.  Pick out something you like to do, and do it.  But figure out how to make it important to other people.  You like to woodwork, right?  You say you never have time to do it.  Do it this weekend.  Film it.  Put it up on YouTube®.  I’ll be checking up with you on Monday.”

I asked myself, why is my friend working at all?  I think because he feels he’s supposed to work.  That having a job is a rule, it’s what he’s always done.  The problem that many of us have is that we tend to create rules where there aren’t any rules.  I’m not sure why.  Perhaps we need to justify what we do.  Perhaps it’s like my two important rules for life:

  1. Don’t tell everything you know.

Success?  My friend is already successful in most ways a person can be successful.  Their life is really good.  I told them, directly, “You’ve been given so many gifts.  If you don’t make something special of your life, you’re wasting it.”

Interestingly, this applies to you, too.

And me.

How will your breakfast taste tomorrow?

Zen and the Art of Marshmallows, Delayed Gratification, Soviet Tanks, and Russian Motorcycles

“Look, the marshmallows aren’t even toasting!  They remain a comfortable sixty-eight degrees!” – The Tick

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Come on, we know that the real villain in Stranger Things™ should have been Stay Puft®.

Once upon a time when I was a five-year-old Wilder, my kindergarten teacher gave me a marshmallow.  “Johnny, if you can wait five minutes before eating that marshmallow, I’ll give you a second marshmallow, and you can enjoy them both.”  The teacher then walked out of the room, closing the door behind her.

I thought furiously.  This must be some sort of trap, with stakes that high.  I looked around for cameras.  Aha!  There they were, disguised cleverly as a new box of chalk and a pencil sharpener.  They’re monitoring me, just as I suspected.  Little did they know, I had anticipated this entire scenario when I had debriefed my friend Thomas A. Anderson* (known on the Dark Web® as Neo™) the previous day.

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Also?  Keanu never ages – he saves that for the picture in his attic.  He looked the same in kindergarten as he does today.

With effort, I slowed the beating of my heart using a technique I had learned from Master Ginsu® during the years I had spent training in Tibet to be a Fake Purse Ninja©**.  I had trained.  I was ready for this.

Very slowly and subtly I pulled a second marshmallow from the front pocket of my Tough Skins® jeans from Sears©.  I put it in my palm.  Quick as a cobra, I then reached out for the marshmallow the teacher had left, but only appeared to leave it there on the plate.  In reality, I had swapped out the marshmallow on the plate for the one I’d brought in my pocket.

In a practiced move, I pretended to pick my nose while in reality I was eating the marshmallow the teacher had left to tempt me, leaving the imposter I’d brought from home in its place.  I felt the rush of the sugars dissolving in my mouth.  Now I could finally understand what Spot was trying to tell Dick and Jane.  The fools!

But I shook my head to clear it of these deep thoughts.  I had finished my surreptitious swap just in time – I heard the footsteps in the hall outside the room, and saw the two dark shadows under the door, letting me know that the teacher was looming like a monster that had slowly slithered out of the bowels of the Earth and decided to go into elementary education.  My heart, despite all of the training began to race again.  The door knob turned.

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Who knew it was that easy?

The teacher had another marshmallow, and started to place it next to my cleverly replaced fake.  She stopped.  She picked up my marshmallow, the one that had brought from home that had been sitting in my pocket for six hours before I made the swap, and studied it.

“Oh, Johnny.  This is gross.  There is lint in this marshmallow.  And bits of string.  And, is that a BB?  This won’t do, this won’t do at all.”  Drat.  I never counted on the relative filth of my pockets giving me away.

I had been caught.  I knew that this would go in my Permanent Record.  Ruined!  And all at the age of five.  Perhaps I could salvage my defeat and defect to the Soviet Union so I could be closer to Bernie Sanders?

Before I could go to Plan B and steal an F-15E from the nearby airbase and leave the country at Mach 2.5 my teacher continued, “No, this won’t do at all.  Let me get you a fresh marshmallow.”  She left the room and came back with two clean, pristine, marshmallows.

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It also felt like this when I swapped our baby for a baby with a better jawline at the hospital just after “Pugsley” was born.  Those nurses hardly ever look away.

Success.  And she never knew what hit her, which would make this the perfect crime.  I ate the second and third marshmallows.

Maybe I overthink these situations?

Nah.

I left the school and then a helicopter exploded behind me as I got into the school bus for the trip home, because that just looks really cool.  And I didn’t even look back.

Okay, absolutely none of that was true, except the exploding helicopter.

But what is true is that a Scientist did a study where they gave a four or five-year-old a marshmallow and promised them a second marshmallow if they didn’t eat the first.  They then followed these kids for 40 years.  Yes.  40 years.  Here’s a (LINK).  Turns out that those kids that waited for the second marshmallow had higher SAT scores, were skinnier, drank less, got stoned less, generally dealt well with stress and had a lot of friends.

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The best way to win an argument with your wife is if it never happened.  Enough vodka works, too.  Does that make this the “Ketamine Maru” scenario?

To be clear:  they never gave me the marshmallow test, because I would have completely Kobayashi Maru’d*** it.  Besides, they were too busy taking knives away from me.  Yes.  In kindergarten.  That’s how you spell freedom.

The concept of the marshmallow test is that the ability to delay gratification is good, and leads to better life outcomes.  We see this all of the time – the ant and the grasshopper was a famous fable – the ants work all summer while the grasshopper goes to meth parties.  Then winter hits, the ants start to party, but the grasshopper is left all tweaked out, tapping at the window of the anthill.  The ant party then intensifies to drown out the tapping and then everyone cheers when the grasshopper finally shows the good sense to just die already.

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Ahhh, Darwinian fables.  They skipped over the part where the ants eat the grasshopper’s frozen corpse.

There is a balance that defines a struggle between now and the future.  If you’re skewed too far to the now, you can certainly bet that all of your decisions will be made without regard to the consequences.  I want the marshmallow now, dangit!  The teacher might not bring me a second marshmallow.  There might not even be a second marshmallow.  Heck, the teacher might not even come back and I’ll be stuck in this room forever.

For most of my life, I’ve lived the “marshmallow later” life.  I think the biggest example of this is that I buy life insurance.  On my life.  I use money that I could use to pay for buying a vintage Soviet T-34 tank (I found one for sale in Poland) and spend it on life insurance.  Okay, $60 a month won’t buy a vintage Soviet T-34 tank from Poland, but you get the picture.

But for the rest of this post, I’ll use (sometimes) Marshmallow to refer to future orientation, and Anti-Marshmallow to refer to “eat it now” orientation.

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It’s a project car, honey.  The guy who sold it to me swore it was one owner.

Future orientation is spending money on something that pays off ONLY IF YOU ARE DEAD.  You will never, ever in your life receive a dime from your own life insurance, unless you have a comically complicated plot to fake your own death.  Yet, if you’re like me, you pay for it so your family can have the best tier of Internet service after you die, because after all, YouTube® isn’t going to watch itself.  In my mind, life insurance is the ultimate Marshmallow test.

Preparing for disasters is another Marshmallow test (Be Prep-ared) that over 90% of your neighbors don’t do at all.  Sticking to a diet is another (The Last Weight Loss Advice You’ll Ever Need, Plus a Girl in a Bikini Drinking Water) that’s not real popular.  I will admit that I buy my share of silly crap on the Internet.  I have several hobbies worth of kits and tools and stuff ready to build when I retire, and that’s Anti-Marshmallow behavior, but the only real hassle with them is finding a great place to store them until I’ve got the time to mess with them, what with the basement being full of ants, grasshoppers, and empty ketamine argument winning bottles.

A few weeks back I made a joke, “I could either spend it on me now, or spend it on an extra box of Depends® when I’m 90.”  If one were to truly be Marshmallow, one would always pick the future comfort, over the comfort of today.  But life is a balance.  If all you do is pick the future, you become the janitor who worked 80 hour weeks for 80 years cleaning schools to leave Harvard® an extra $20 million to turn liberal rich kids into CNN® anchors.

If you become completely Anti-Marshmallow, well, you’re broke.  Those are two extremes.  Maybe this time you want Moderation?

Last week I mentioned that Moderation is for Monks, and Adam Piggott, Gentleman Adventurer added some great thoughts.  You can read it here, and you should (LINK), in fact you should be reading him daily.  Anyone who says, “Be the very best bastard that you can be,” is worth your time.

And he says moderation is good – moderation in having a cigar, and not the box.  Splitting a bottle of wine with your wife on Friday, but not on all days ending in the letter y.  And that’s Discipline, which is very Marshmallow.  But is Discipline moderate in 2019 when the motto of the Western world is if it feels good, do it?  Probably not.

But yet, there’s a time to be Marshmallow, and a time to be (at least a bit) Anti-Marshmallow.  Maybe a T-34 is overkill – I don’t live anywhere near Kursk****.  But maybe, just maybe, I should get a Ural®.  The Mrs. has already signed off on it and said “You should get that.  It looks cool.”  To Marshmallow or to not to Marshmallow.  I guess to be Marshmallow, at some point you have to eat the marshmallows.  Otherwise Harvard© will.

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I hear Elon Musk is including anti-gravity as a new Tesla® feature.  If I bought a Ural®, I’d skip the Russians and the machine gun, because the Russians would drink all my booze and then invade Colorado only to be thrown back by a plucky school Spanish club.*****

Me?  I don’t like marshmallows all that much.  Except on ‘smores®.  And then I roast mine slowly to get the full mushy goodness without it turning into something that looks like a cat caught at Hiroshima.

Which, I guess is the Marshmallow way to eat marshmallows.

 

*The Matrix.  Too bad they never made a sequel to that movie.

**Bowfinger.  If you haven’t seen it, you’re dead to me.  Yes, it’s that funny.

***Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan.  Really?  Please tell me you already knew this one.

****Sort of like Burning Man®, but for tanks. 1943.

*****Nope.  You can figure this one out.

Only 3% of Your Decisions Matter, or, Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There!

“We’re very lucky in the band in that we have two visionaries, David and Nigel.  They’re like poets, like Shelley and Byron.  They’re two distinct types of visionaries, it’s like fire and ice, basically.  I feel my role in the band is to be somewhere in the middle of that, kind of like lukewarm water.” – This is Spinal Tap

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Oh, I don’t need alcohol to make bad decisions.  But it doesn’t hurt.  Just ask Tiger Woods.

Life is filled with events.  Some of them are predictable, some not.  But I generally break the events that will influence the course of my life into three categories because I’m sitting in a meeting and it kind of looks like I’m actually working when I take blog notes:

  1. Certainties

Certainties are just as shown on the label – things that are certain to happen.  These are one extreme of the spectrum, for instance unless a race of aliens is intent on destroying humanity so that Bono™ doesn’t escape the Earth and infect the galaxy and drops a Moon-size batch of anti-matter into the Sun causing a solar flare that extinguishes life, the Sun will come up tomorrow.  Notice I didn’t say that the race of aliens was evil, in fact it seems entirely logical and rational and a good choice – Bono© as a trade for the rest of humanity.  Other examples of certainty:

  • Death.
  • Taxes.
  • Someone saying “Death and Taxes” when they write about certainties (at least every year since Christopher Bullock first wrote the phrase in 1716 in Ye Olde Bloge Poste on the Worlde Wilde Web).
  • Gravity.  Like Bono®, it also sucks.
  • Celebrities flying in private jets to protest global warming.
  1. Impossibilities

Impossibilities are things that cannot happen in this Universe.  Okay, it’s not a creative title, like calling your dog “dog” and your cat “cat” – and we both know people who have done just that.

The number of things that I thought were impossible were nearly zero when I was under age five or so.  Starships were only 20 years in the future.  I would own a tank.  And I’d marry Miss Roberts, my first grade teacher.  About the time I went to high school, the number of Impossible things started to climb.  I think this happens when you start experiencing disappointments in life, like the Space Shuttle.  I mean, why did humanity spend so much time trying to get to space with a ship that had the glide ratio of a brick?

I think my Impossibles peaked in my thirties.  After a divorce and NOT winning a MacArthur© Grant for my incredible ability to sleep on the couch while the kids watched Saturday morning cartoons, my view of what was possible shrank.  But as I grew older, I kept seeing the same pattern – if people tried things, they often achieved them.  There are, however, things that are really Impossible.  What are some Impossible things?

  • A Beatles® reunion.   A living Beatles™ reunion.
  • The molecules of Leonardo Dicaprio spontaneously rearranging themselves to form something useful, like a ham sandwich or a beer.
  • A good, new Star Wars® movie will be made during my lifetime.

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Is it me, or have John and George lost weight?

I think one of the really neat things about being human is the curiosity and creativity that allows us to think of things that could never, ever happen, like Johnny Depp learning to read.  It’s a great day to be alive!

 

  1. Things That Might Happen

Most things in life are neither Certain nor Impossible.  They fall into that grey area of possibility that makes life interesting.  I find it fascinating that so much of life consists of these contrasts – in between the chaos of fire Venus and the stasis of icy Mars lies, well, us.  The other day I heard an astronomer state if you take average star weight and the weight of an atom, you end up at about 50 kilograms©, whatever that is.  But the average human weighs . . . 62 kilograms®.  It’s almost like this place was made for us.

Hmmm.

Anyway, while not everything interesting happens in the middle, most interesting things happen in the middle.  But, in the interest of continuing to subcategorize, I see two types of events in that sweet middle region:

A.  Events You Can’t Influence

Sometimes, whatever’s going to happen is beyond your control.  Despite what you want or any action you might take, the outcome will be the same.  You can’t change a thing.  Call it fate.  It’s not certain that the event will happen, mind you, it’s just that you can’t control it.  Some examples are:

  • How much Oprah will weigh tomorrow morning.
  • Collapse of the global financial system.
  • Whether Ilhan Omar will join the Hair Club for Men.

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Baldness – I hear it’s more common if your family interbreeds too often . . . oh.  Sorry. H/T WRSA (LINK).

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So, this is a record – my first back-to-back meme.  Is that not MacArthur Grant® worthy?

B.  Things you can influence or control

Here is where it gets interesting.  In my option (and in my experience) most people can control more about their lives than they want to admit.  Personally, it’s scary how many things that I’ve tried to do in my life that I’ve accomplished, which makes me wonder if I haven’t aimed too low.  I’ve recently changed one of my goals to be horribly unrealistic (learn how to make a tasty pizza, or at least buy a tasty pizza) so I’ll keep you updated on the progress on that stretch goal.

But what sorts of things can you control?

  • Your weight.
  • If you shower.
  • If you smoke.
  • Your psychic power to make Taylor Swift love you using only your mind.
  • If you go broke.

Now, I didn’t say you have total control of your life, but some actions you take (not decisions you make, mind you, but actions that you take) can influence most things about your life, including how you die and when you die.

But even as beautifully written as the preceding was, it’s not the where the post is going to end up.  The point I’m getting to is, how many events that occur in your life, choices that you make, should you really worry about.

I’m thinking about 3% or less.

From my vantage point, most things don’t matter.  Examples?

  • Yellow or blue Post-It™ notes?
  • Romaine or iceberg lettuce?
  • Tom Brady’s 2015 clone or Tom Brady’s 2018 clone.

Most decisions that you make simply do not matter at all.  My personal difficulty is that I sometimes don’t process a decision like that.  I want to make the right decision so I’ll spend time researching and learning online about a purchase I’m going to make . . . of something I’ll use exactly once and then toss into a closet.  Heck, as an example tonight I’ve spent about half an hour trying to decide between one type of laptop and another.  Does it matter?

Probably not.

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What I did with the flowchart was just start with a random decision or event.  Does it matter?  I pulled out Pareto’s rule, and off the bat, 80% of decisions in your life . . . don’t matter at all.  Paper or plastic.  .556 or .762.  Drilling a hole in your head or spending time with five year old children.

That means that 20% of the events matter.  Cool.  How many can your actions influence?  I’m betting 80% of that 20%.  That’s a huge number and from my experience it seems about right.  You’re rarely a complete victim.  That’s 16% left.

Is it the effort worth it.  I came up with . . . 80% of the time, no.  The time and effort to manage every event, even just 16% of them, is a lot.  You have to let some things go, since even if it matters, it’s not worth your time to influence everything around you.

The math is simple.  97% of decisions in life you should make with either no care or minor care.  They just don’t matter.  The good news is that means if you manage and select the decision you make, you can live, more or less, the life you want by only dealing with 3%.

Why?  I find that things we think are important, that society tells us are important decisions or important actions are not.  Here’s what I’ve found:

  • We bought Stately Wilder Manor© about a decade ago. The Mrs. was living in Houston, and the house that we’d fallen in love with had cheated on us and was purchased by two doctors.  I was working outside of Houston, but we still needed a place to live, because we were going to move.  I kept looking.  I found a house.  Given that (then) the market was hot, I put in an offer.  The Mrs. had never even seen the house until the day we moved in.

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How do you get the dead hooker smell out of carpet?  Asking for a friend.

  • The last care I bought was a replacement for The Mrs.’ MUV (Mrs. Utility Vehicle). I was passing through a large city in Midwestia, stopped off at a car lot, and bought a car.  They delivered it to Modern Mayberry the next day.  Again, The Mrs. hadn’t driven or seen the new car.

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Okay, it’s not that bad.  But while The Boy was driving it some woodland critter ran straight into the side of it.  The dent does not look hooker related.

Within relatively broad parameters, most decisions, even decisions that society says are “big” decisions, don’t matter.  Which house we got didn’t matter all that much, we just needed a house.  Admittedly we are horrible neighbors, so it’s best if there are no pesky homeowner associations.

And I wasn’t like that on the first house I bought.  We must have seen dozens of houses over months until we found . . . the one.  The first car I bought, I agonized over the decision.  Until I found . . . the one.

Strangely, I didn’t spend nearly enough time selecting my first wife she who will not be named and that had a much larger impact than any house or car ever could to my life.  There’s a joke in here about test driving and rentals, but I’m just gonna skip it.

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It’s all the aftermarket add-ons that get you.

The point is not that I was young and stupid, although I really was young and stupid.

The point is:  Don’t worry.  Plan?  Sure.  Prepare?  Absolutely.  But like Pop Wilder always said, “Don’t pay interest on money you haven’t borrowed yet, son.”

97% of actions you take . . . don’t matter.  Don’t sweat them.  And don’t spend a second worrying about things you can’t change or influence.

But on those things you can?  Strike hard, like the fist of an angry god.  Never give up.  You can move mountains that way.  Feel motivated?  Good!

Now go out and get it done!  Oh, it’s Friday?

Kick back and get it done Monday.

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Okay, I did once upon a time pretend my toy Thompson submachine gun was a phaser®.  Once.