On Love

Since dislocating my shoulders (which is a pertinent reminder to write a post called "rationalizing my own stupidity" and look, I've already derailed this post) and yes I mean "shoulders" plural or the technical term I learned "bilateral dislocation;" I have found the new habit of taking long evening walks. This will probably change now summer is behind us, but the seasonal transitions are not as well defined as our calendar.

I walk late at night, and I walk far. I most often listen to audiobooks, but as my concentration and attention continues to improve, I tend to lift heavier weights - attention-wise - by walking in serene silence.

The lateness allows me to see fauna I had never really observed because I did not hit Melbourne's interlaced trails at night for all the decades I've lived here. Maybe once or twice riding a bicycle home along an actual trail rather than the most direct grab-bag of streets between a gig-venue and my home, I would see a fox. But Melbourne's many parks, gardens and park-like spaces accommodate an abundance of foxes. There is also the majestic silent flight of owls. The dusk exodus of cockatoos and commute of bats are well known and well observed, as are possums who often leave testimony of their nocturnal life through the electrocuted corpses found beneath above ground powerlines around suburbia.

If I walk later, I see more foxes, owls, spiders in the middle of highly ambitious webs. If I leave earlier I see more dog walkers.

And every dog on a walk has a smile for me and I for them. Two evenings ago I came across a little buddy for whom I had to pull out my headphones to say hello. He was happy as a clam, wobbling and fumbling around on two extremely gimpy back legs with a kind of boundless oblivious energy that resembled a kid in a candy store.

As one does, I asked his owner "how old?" (En Mexico gentes preguntar "masculino o feminino?" de sus perritos.) and surprisingly he said "Three" and began to detail that they were 1.5 years into extensive rehab after spinal surgery, including hydrotherapy. 

This, is love. One can look at a situation like this like a cautionary tale of the reverse lottery of dog ownership. Most people cannot just let a puppy die, the reverse lottery of dog ownership is to buy a dog (and the designer dogs can be quite expensive, breeders earn their keep on a single litter of puppies and pay for their house with one mother's total legal output) get attached and then discover yourselves in for medical bills.

Love is the attachment to your dog, and the simple reality that for $10,000 you can keep your dog around a little longer with some quality of life, and for $2,500 you can buy another dog, that merely has the potential to become your second or nth dog, but you will have a your-dog sized scar in your heart for the rest of your life.

For me though, though it sucks, love is what money is for. Yes, this is a post, and I know this is poor form, about economics. 

Watch for example The Martian, where millions of dollars are spent to rescue Matt Damon from Mars, his crew who decide to resupply and form his rescue mission lose themselves a year of terrestrial living in order to risk a small window of opportunity to get Matt Damon back to Hollywood.

Think then, on all the other causes that money could be spent on, to save more human lives than Matt Damon. For a fraction of the cost food security could be given to populations suffering famine. Vaccines could be rolled out and diseases that kill children eliminated. A few thousand dollars could prevent hundreds of deaths from preventable mosquito born diseases. 

But I think, The Martian works as a movie because we are not accountants and actuaries. We intuitively calculate the symbolic value of rescuing a stranded solitary human being on an alien planet, and most people would I think concur that it is worth the spend to expand our human frontiers in this way.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb in one of his books points out that during the Lebanese civil war, where people were being killed daily in violent armed conflict, the popular imagination was captured by an Italian girl who got stuck down a well.

I heard an argument from Cam Murray that persuaded me, at least, that Australia's superannuation should be repealed as a scheme, and I do focus here on one relevant argument, which is exactly the situation where you get a letter from your Superfund that tells you you have $20,000 and a vet tell you you need $6,000 for surgery for your dog or it dies. So you of course let your dog die, because there's nothing in the scheme that says you can access your super in these circumstances, you'll just have to wait 45 years to enjoy that $20,000 with which you can finally commission a memorial statue...or something.

(Other arguments against Super are that it is funded out of wage-rises, as in employers fund the contributions instead of giving pay rises. It helps grow wealth inequality, and most people should they have super use it to just pay down their mortgage and retire etc. etc.)

At which point, we can expand love beyond the love felt between man and dog, one of the purest and longstanding loves, despite like all forms of love, there being its perversions and betrayels in the specific. But the same goes for our lovers, our children, our family, friends, extended family.

This is what money is for, and I've monitored the exchange rates. In Mexico I heard of a particularly moving story where a woman we knew had a son get into a motorcycle accident. The local hospital said he would die if he was not transported to a hospital that can help him. In a country like Australia, this can arise for the uninsured if they need to be helicoptered to a big-city hospital from a remote area, because despite universal health care this does not cover ambulance services, and the ambulances that fly can hit you with a bill in the $100,000s. Btw ambulance membership is like 50 smackeroos a year and covers any and all bills.

Where was I? Blessed Mexico. Yes, so...[ugh] in Australia you would get the helicopter anyway, then declare bankruptcy and maybe have to sell your house. In Mexico, there's a good chance the house won't cover the cost of the IC ambulance transportation, so you get presented with "pay or die." scenarios. This mother was able to secure a loan from an In-law for some collosal sum that would be in Australian terms the vicinity of $100k, to be paid back...somehow. For this was not an investment opportunity, and even if it were a high risk one because there was so much to still do to save the son's life.

He was transported, some amputations and organ removals were made, an induced coma and I'm happy to report that he pulled through and to my knowledge is still alive to this day. It is entirely possible that somebody wound up financially ruined by this act of love, but the decisions made reflect well on everyone involved bar the state of Mexico.

That's but one example of the exchange rate. Desperate non-solutions to that of preserving our time on this planet and our opportunities to be in the vicinity of love include what an elderly Kerry Packer paid his long time helicopter pilot for his kidney to buy him a few more months of life, botox, ozempic etc.

I've heard many boomers remark and assert of their age cohort in general that the richest of them would give it all to be (our) age again. This remark I'm sure only holds under the assumption that such a transaction would be miraculous. Should rejuvenating technologies actually exist, I'm sure competition would drive the prices down, such that we would discover that boomers would stop short of giving it all to be my age or younger, and instead settle for helping some guy with a machine enough money to pay off his sportscar finances, or some guy with a machine made in China enough money to pay his rent for one week.

But if the Faustian pact was available, everything to be 21 again, I kind of wish boomers would take it, to gain an appreciation of how much youth is depreciated by the generational apartheid on assets. How I would love to see how an influx of 21 year olds entering the job market, who may know a lot more about financing a company and paying minimal income taxes, fare with their degrees from the 70s and early 80s held by a quarter of them, and their inability to type with ten digits over two, and their grasp of OSs, coding etc. hold up in an ultra-competitive job-market, especially when the devil now controls the majority of Capital.

I feel only the exceptionally successful boomers would have a chance. The rest, having a second wind of youth with which to truly experience the pleasures of meth, jenkem and bath salts.

And this brings me to the severity of the exchange rate, which is the how little respect we give for those who will fork over a fortune of money, literally the tokens of debt owed to them for work they have suffered through, for the love of puppy, or spouse, or child, or brother or sister. 

This is, one of the first and last good points Brett Weinstein made: We have to look at the fate of benevolent firms.

We live in a world where many successful businesses' true competitive edge is a disregard for laws and regulations. They get around minimum wages by having workers work twice the hours they are paid for and so on. 

The problem with the true price of love, are the people waiting, ready and willing to swoop in and take your house. 

In this sense I am somewhat sympathetic to former worlds-richest-man and oil magnate Paul Getty, though I know him mostly through the onscreen depiction from "All the Money in the World" where when his grandson and namesake was kidnapped, first by people he had instigated in his own scheme, and eventually by the Calabrian Mafia, he declined to pay the ransom - out of consideration of the safety of all his other numerous grandchildren. He eventually paid an agreed sum equal to the maximum he could claim in taxes or on insurance or something. It was sizeable but relative to his wealth miserly, and his grandson's physical and mental health by then was irreversibly damaged.

But we really have no protection for people who choose for their own sake and for the extended, integrated network of loved ones, to choose love over money. There's no backstop where people can go bankrupt but for their assets their generational wealth, which even while being quite modest, under growing wealth inequality must be defended at all costs.

Now people waste exorbitant amounts of money all the time at the top end of town, forget about surgeries for sickly dogs. First class flights? The price point difference between a 9am flight from Melb to Sydney on Jetstar in roughly 5 weeks from today is $122 (with baggage allowance) to $1,094 for a Qantas business class flight same time same day. There just isn't the utility to be extracted from Business class in a roughly 3 hour flight. Sure there is then the lounge memberships, early boarding etc. and many wealthy people use charter flights in private jets. 

Now the incremental utility grows with frequency of travel. It is fair enough that someone who has to fly for work a hundred times a year, be put in the peak comfort available. I'm also assuming that businesses get tax concessions for travel expenses like this, while keeping the financial assets like frequent flyer points becoming effectively public business infrastructure.

But there's also the car collecting, the country and town houses, the beach houses etc. and all the associated upkeep, the race horse part ownership etc. But can these low-utility excesses a) keep an even keel between people sacrificing all for love and b) be called a form of love of their own?

“I say that homosexuality is not just a form of sex, it's a form of love, and it deserves our respect for that reason.” — Christopher Hitchens.

Is love of limited run super and hyper cars a form of love that deserves our respect? If so, only in proportion. Certainly far less than the love of lovers, should be afforded to a love of things. With all but the most handcrafted by dead artisans, things, unlike your dog can be replaced by an identical thing. Whether new for old (like a new Lotus) or old for old (like a restored DeLorean). 

Bringing me to a question that I have had an uncomfortable amount of time to ponder, for which I will have to establish a little context.

My oldest friend, chronologically, killed himself which is statistically, one of the most likely ways for a man to die, so I am by no means alone in having such a thing disrupt my life and sense of place in the universe nor even unusual. What was of tremendous consolation to me, was how I had interacted with my friend while he was alive. The Hitchens phrase above is one that he oft repeated, having gone to the effort of crafting it, but I draw it from his memoir Hitch-22 as my most recent hearing of it. In the same audiobook there was packaged an interview with the author, contemporary to publication of his audiobook, where he was asked "why now" and he remarked that many of his friends had paid him the compliment of suggesting it was too soon, and that he had much good work ahead of him. But Hitchens pointed out that one doesn't get to experience the advent of it being "too late" to write an autobiography on account of being dead.

In the same sense, whatever my friend's state of mind was when he ended his own life, somewhere in the biological building blocks of that mind was the certain knowledge that I loved him, that I had said what needed saying before it was too late. This is because, while certainly the worst loss I'd experienced in my life, it was not the first. 

And here is the crux: I have observed people who live there lives, largely as habit (and I would too, were I secured enough) remarking about how a death can "put things in perspective" and I have no doubt they are experiencing the dizzying reorientation of how before the news they'd been consumed with some trivial task they were required to do at work. 

What I generally observe though, is that for many the grieving process is merely a disruption to the habitual life. What most appear to do (and this may be an illusion of the alienating nature of grief) is process until they rediscover the reasons their habitual life formed in the first place.

Something like "the reason I care about the reconciling the weekly stock reports with the monthly stock reports is that I am paid to care, by my employer, and with that pay I secure the things my children need so they may one day have a job like mine that will allow them to provide for their children."

Which is to say, they gain some perspective, but not a sustainable one. 

The question I was forced to ponder, was the debilitating effects of maintaining the kind of perspective that comes with grief. To truly realize that much economic activity, does not matter or at worst, is actually counterproductive to achieving love and life.

This is a perspective that is no doubt disquieting, but the reality we live in is one of FTX, Enron, LTCM, Theranos etc. People turned up to work at Enron, went through inductions including OH&S videos where they possibly were told technically they should change shoes in order to lift an archive box from a storage shelf, sexual harassment, they were given a desk and a swipe card to enter and exit buildings, a network login and an email, they received payslips and salary was deposited in their bank accounts and pension funds. They paid their taxes, and laboured away in various departments, all the while having no idea about the full implications of "Mark to Market" accounting that would enventually liquidate the entire firm and invalidate whole lifetimes of economic activity.

To be sure, many an innocent and unassuming productive worker at Enron likely paid down a mortgage and put their children through school through the attractive salaries offered and recieved. It was not a total waste of their lives, but the part of their life wasted was all that they produced for Enron. One has to chalk it up to a learning experience, but then the skills learned by doing useful work for an ultimately useless company carry the stink of the Enron brand to a resume, and job interviews are often decided in 40 seconds based on attire, demeanour, grooming, manner and punctuality before getting to the thorny question of whether you were caught up in the demise of Enron or a somewhat innocent drone.

An archetypal news story, I guarantee to recur so long as you are alive is "[Insert publicly listed company here] posts $x.x Bn losses" which means that the sum total culmination of effort exerted by workers in that company went toward delivering a service or product that more people didn't want or need than did.

The premise of "It's a wonderful life" is that Jimmy Stewart has one fucking job to deliver a fat wad of cash to the bank to avoid bankruptcy and forfeiture of assets and he fucks it up. He then wishes he'd never been born and an angel shows him what life would be like if he hadn't been, where he realizes the significant positive impact he has had and chooses to live.

The fact though for most of us, is that we are largely redundant. That in itself is fine, even with redundancy ultimately some component has to do the things that are of value. But in the recent 20th Century we had vast amounts of devestation and bloodshed - from the Trench Warfare of The Great War that ravaged Europe and fed a whole generation of young men into a meat grinder, where the Christmas day truce lasted so long military command had to force the soldiers to resume killing each other again. Then WWII that also had the Holocaust, through to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, famines in India etc. Then there was Stalinism (~10 million, mostly famine and gulags and 1 million in political executions) and Maoism (40 to 80 million estimated dead best summed up in Maoism) , and if you are reading this, you are probably sitting in a place where you are more or less fine, with access to water and food, shelter and internet. Sorry to those of you who are homeless reading this on a phone plugged into a socket in a train station or shopping centre.

Happily in recent times, I am inclined to concur that my perspective is likely not debilitating. I have no problem with people acquiring what I should dub a modest wealth. And consistent with my views on The Martian, a truly talented athlete that can capture the imagination of so many and expand seemingly the frontiers of human possibility like Michael Jordan is probably as rich as I think a person should be, albeit this is restricted to the exorbitant wages paid to him by the Chicago Bulls that were so in excess of what anyone else in the NBA was paid, that they actually put in a wage cap that held until inflation allowed Steph Curry to earn Jordan's 90s money some 20 years later. Not the having children make shoes for $s and selling them for $$$s side that has made Jordan a billionaire.

And there's nothing wrong with billionaire's so long as they are paying taxes, taxes like someone would pay if they were paid a billion dollars for work, and not the sale value of the assets they hold, where they pay destabilizingly little tax.

The fact is, mental health is king. We experience our own lives subjectively, and the tragedy of meeting an unhappy and insecure rich person, is not just that their lack of perspective has wasted their lives, but needs must be concluded that they have likely wasted much of everyone else's lives that have invested in them. Perhaps somebodies can sometimes throw money at a person who lacks perspective so they can take it and make money for them while they spend their precious time achieving Eudaimonia but right up to the POTUS and DOGEUS down to the local well-healed nobody whose bones will be indistinguishable from all the other hairless apes, the king goes back into the box with all the other pawns and all that, who cannot shut up about how smart he is to have built a property portfolio to provide a service valued by nobody (in many cases literally nobody, because they are just sitting on and speculating on property prices) and leaving a legacy that will not have their great grandchildren even knowing their names.

And I am not driving at achievement culture as described by Byung-Chul Han in "The Burnout Society" as the alternative here. Because someone is likely to remember Musk and Trump in three generations time, assuming there's anyone here to remember, and Putin and Xi and whoever else too, are not examples to look to and their lives, despite their accomplishments all, look like they lack perspective. The lives of people who have risen to heights of influence that have placed them completely out of touch. No a life quite ordinary can be meaningful and rewarding, so long as it keeps the price of love firmly in perspective.

As I wrote the last few paragraphs, I could overhear one of my loved ones on a phone advocating for another of our loved ones. This same loved one recently had a birthday and we the family that were able gathered to celebrate it in a modest and intimate dinner with modest but delicious food and cake. I was coming off a particularly challenging week, one filled with disorienting ambivalence as I met some of the best and worst people to deal with all mixed up like the climbs and dips of a rollercoaster.

My aunt was a tonic after that week, to sit down with because she is good and decent and kind, and maybe these very qualities have lead to her being denied much in life, though there are other factors at play. The fact is I love her and she is worth loving.

My chief persistent pang (which is good to write because an ear would likely hear "pain" where it expects to hear it) is from my Mexican dogs, and yes, I'm circling in for a conclusion. Some conscious part of me understands how worthy of ridicule it is to build my life plans going forward about reuniting with our short-lived companions before they die, when dogs are a dime a dozen, or un peso por docena, but they are my dogs not in any legal sense, but in the attachment formed. 

Yes, ironically, it was Usma that taught me there were more dogs to love after Bess, my companion of 15 years from childhood to prolonged adolescence. I know I can fall in love with another dog, but we already love eachother. And I know that dogs tend not to follow "absence makes the heart grow fonder" for their survival instinct are too strong, and they operate their affections more along the "what have you done for me lately" lines. But I am supremely confident it would take just a few hours before after a feed they want to curl up by me again, once again, in love.

Truly coming full circle on this long walk, yesterday on lunch break I happened across quite the opposite pairing of owner and dog. A healthy strapping dog in its prime, on the leash of a man who had severe burns covering at least 50% of his face. I don't know his circumstances, he was walking through the lawyer part of downtown, not in the student and shopper part sitting with a makeshift sign declaring him homeless. 

But those debilitating injuries and scarring can't make life easy, probably not easier than mine, and it puts me in mind of all those homeless, those sleeping rough be it in Melbourne, Australia freq. world's most liveable city, or the streets of Mexico, and their animal companions, typically dog who no doubt increase donations by their mere presence, help keep them safe from molestation and assault at night and form a precious loving bond, unconditional but fragile.

Herein lies the perspective, worth maintaining - if you are homeless you get a pass. Life must be constant stress, so insecure. Everyone else, keep and defend your best energy for those you love. You may be giving work and career your all for those you love, but they don't get to experience your energy. They get to nurse your exhausted self while you recuperate. The economics says, you are not reaping the rewards of your productivity. Productivity has surged in the last 50 years and workers have seen none of the gains, beyond the cost reductions of technology. 

The blind leading the blind is fine, provided your blindness isn't caused by shutting your eyes to remember your infrequently used pin number through muscle memory. If you can open your eyes and maybe lead a blind person instead to secure love and mental comfort.