One "Why" I Didn't Get the Ladies in Highschool

 Disclaimer

The reason I spent most of my time in high-school as a very eligible bachelor is overdetermined, even excluding all the the reasons I don't even know about. Some of those reasons persist to this very day and overlap entirely with reasons my friends periodically need a break from our friendships.

Disclaimer out of the Way

The particular reason of many I want to talk about, I only stumbled across recently. I'm a fan of adman Rory Sutherland, a cartoonish character who synthesizes a lot of pop-science and applies it. 

Anyway, this guy in one of his many interviews, possibly one cut down to a short was talking about that ambiguous class of people known as "creative people" and compensation. He made a connection for me I had never made on my own, even though I was swimming in it, like David Foster Wallace's fish. 

Rory asserted that creative people enjoy a kind of premium on their wages, because they don't need to spend a lot of money to basically, whatever. I would say "stimulate themselves" but I suspect for most people that evokes imagery of inserting some battery powered device into themselves.

Which may well be a good enough example, creative people would probably turn out to spend less on getting off. 

But if you take like a holiday... 

The Elephant in The Room

Sorry I had to interrupt to address the fact that I've just launched into basically identifying myself as creative and the rest of you as mostly not. Being someone who has long got about the arts scene, not just here in Melbourne but also in Mexico, I dislike the term "creatives" for two largish reasons:

1. The first being that "uncreatives" doesn't work as an antonym, visual artists, musicians and DJs can form snobby little cliques and call themselves "creative" but it doesn't follow that a bunch of accountants, lawyers, doctors, engineers, nurses and programmers are being "uncreative".
2. The term "creatives" actually in my experience fosters a lack of creativity. It most often is referring to the "creative aesthetic" which is, people dressing in a kind of artist or muso blackface, haemorrhaging money realising what they think will pass as having something to say because Warhol or Duchamp or Yoko Ono or Arcade Fire already said it. Subculture conformity (or garden variety conformity at one remove) basically.

Personally, I think a "creative person" is someone who creates a lot of stuff, be it prose, poetry, music, lyrics, paintings, sculpture, programs, speeches, audits, excel spreadsheets or databases. 

I'm likely comfortable calling myself creative on objective grounds, I've drawn the drawings, painted the paintings, played shitty bass lines, acted, written, directed, hammered the nails etc.

JP introduced me to one attempt to objectively measure individual creativity. The one that people may know is the "write as many uses for a brick in a minute" or something, and everyone including myself gets blown away by the kid that came up with "paper clip holder" however, I now feel a kid couldn't come up with that answer, as what kid knows what paper clips are anymore?

I digress, there's basically some survey for which the average score is 0. It has all these categories that measure level of accomplishment in a bunch of creative fields, from music to art to architecture. Furthermore, even amongst creative people, the average score across fields is 0, as very few people both record an album of songs they composed themselves and have a building they designed constructed etc.

On that checklist, though I've never reached the highest levels of accomplishment in any field, I went surprisingly far in numerous fields most of which I don't identify with - like drama.

So from here on out, that's the sense in which I'm calling some people creative and others not, and putting myself in the creative camp. I think I even get points for writing a shitty blog on an ancient website.

Back to the post-Disclaimed Narrative

...So you picture a holiday, you probably picture a resort with a swim up bar in a pool with decks and lounges and then sandy beaches and then turquoise waters out to a reef that you have to fly to. 

Or even a weekend, most people might think of going shopping, going to the footy, going to brunch or hosting a dinner party.

This is the "premium" Rory asserts creative people get, without crucially employing it as a justification to not pay creative people equitably. 

Creative people don't need to spend that money to have a good time. Indeed, I am often happy to spend a day off writing a blog post. 

So to bring this back to high school dating, how much did it cost to go on a really good date?

For you, I'm going to guess $30 of late 90s Y2K money. For me? $3.20 because we could sit and share chips and gravy in Ballarat Central Square Arcade from Chequers (still in business, but $6.50) and then walk maybe across the tracks and sit in a fairly sketchy park where we would talk until we made out.

I mean I once went on local public TV dating show "More Amore" a version of the dating game, where winning contestants went on a date paid by the production to, in our case, Hoffbrauhaus a German restaurant that included men dancing and slapping each other in lederhosen. I don't need any of that shit because I can create an experience through conversation, questions.

Indeed, while I promise I will eventually thread the needle of how this hampered my ability to get the ladies, a divorce lawyer here sings the benefits of couples bonding over pizza in a park over dropping $250, because if you lead with your wallet it will "always be transactional." Which I will also at some point come back to.

But if I am reminiscing about actual dates I went on, how did you NOT get the ladies in Highschool?

I was a late bloomer, and I should take a second to acknowledge all those who bloomed after me, and those yet to bloom. I basically between mid-year 12 and 3rd year uni went through my serial monogomy phase, with relationships lasting longer and longer, but never quite being viable. For most of highschool I had crushes, and no action. Then far more crushes and minimal action. But I never felt unattractive, this is what has me captivated by Rory's assertion, because it reconciles with these facts of my experience.

On the periphery of my vision, I was aware that there were some guys who were so unattractive their value proposition to attractive girls, was to give them free drugs, and to this day, this is one thing I have noted down to warn my daughters about when I hand them a copy of Salt N' Pepa's "Very Necessary" to figure out the rest.

Assuming even pathetic weed to be reasonably expensive by the gram, beyond this, I wasn't really aware of what average joe's might be spending on their best gals.

I spend almost nothing, because I basically have never got in the habit of spending anything. It wouldn't occur to me to spend anything, not until like two weeks ago when Rory was asserting that it was much cheaper to be creative.

It makes sense right? Like we've seen enough of those lockdown epicurious videos where a pro-chef swaps $400 ingredients for a pancake with a home chefs $8 worth of ingredients, and the home chef has to follow some complicated recipe using sturgeon roe and snow crab with advice from a food scientist and I'm pretty sure the fucking recipe, while the pro-chef generally makes something better with the $8 ingredients anyway.

At pro-chef level, that's the ratio of the creativity premium - 50x. Like I literally don't know what the vast middle-band of uncreative peers did on their dates. We're all horny teenagers that weren't even thinking about asexuality back then, because it used to be sufficiently exciting to have the occasional gay or lesbian kid in the whole school. (They weren't, just very few came out until after high-school, in many cases, immediately after high-school) but anyway, if you could go out with someone, and someone sufficiently experienced to get over the frigidity hurdle, then everyone had a cheap good time awaiting them in terms of finding somewhere to make out.

But I suspect, probably a bunch of dudes bought girls they had been dating for two-weeks, and would be dating for a further two weeks, expensive apparel maybe from the surf shops, or maybe globe sneakers, an anklet, Oakley sunglasses, maybe you took them to La Porchetta's or Da Vinci's or L'Espresso or Olive Grove if she was trying to get into medicine. 

Maybe you went shopping and used the money you earned at McDonald's to get her that thing she had her eye on in the hopes of getting your dingaling touched, or maybe getting some fingers inside her.

I don't know, I wasn't paying attention. I fell in love with L when I asked her out, and she suggested we meet at the Pancake Parlour. A sensation I since saw captured in Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things" when a character remarks "There goes a jazz tune." Now two creative people on a date - you are talking super cheap dates, so long as one or both aren't "creatives".

The Brick Actually Explains Much

By Andrewlister - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12018011

I've been avoiding the brick test because of my strong association with consultant hacks that tour around  businesses-that-won't-give-a-payrise-above-inflation-to-top-performing-employees but will drop $2k~$10k on some hack to run a workshop where they drop some pop-science that theoretically could be put into practice but most staff are just happy to be paid to be there. That's their pay rise.

What I would guess is the leading flaw in the Brick-creativity test, is that every time it is administered, they still have the subject of the test be a brick. 

Whereas for robust results, the test should likely be run through multiple iterations with swapping subjects - a brick, a chair, a whisk, a smart phone, a pencil, a PET-bottle etc. 

If it is a brick every time, and worse, every workshop facilitator mentions "paper clip holder" in the intro, then people can just gradually accumulate more uses for a brick with practice, so it fails the retestability. 

Logically then, if there are people who struggle to come up with 8 uses for a brick in 3 minutes and people who run out of time at 120 uses, and this is because of a variation in "creativity" trait, logically this extrapolates out to everything.

From whence, the creativity wage-premium emerges. Do you need to "get the gear" to go on a hike? Perhaps even just a Leatherman multi-tool? Or can you creatively use your regular shoes to also walk a hiking trail in, take a snickers instead of trail mix, use your hand to drink water from the stream etc.?

(Warning: By "hike" I'm referring to any kind of day trip, not heading off trail and navigating using a compass and map with a very real chance of disappearing for 72 hrs, getting hypothermia and dying. In which case the "creative" approach may just result in being dangerously underprepared. I'm referring to not needing Nordic Walking Poles, energy bars and drink bottle for a 3.6km round trip to a spring from a carpark.)

In the kitchen you may or may not be familiar with something Alton Brown popularised as the "uni-tasker" which is a kitchen gadget that only does one hyper-specific thing. This would be at the extreme of concrete thinking. But multiply out the difference of whether you can think of 2 or 10 uses for EVERYTHING in the first few seconds to EVERYTHING and creative people are just going to have way less material demands.

I caught up with a friend from high-school and was telling him about this Rory-gifted insight, and he is now expecting a child with his partner who is an artist, and remarked that when he met her he discovered her entire kitchen apparel consisted of one pot and a spatula with which she prepared everything. Possible embellishments aside, this negative correlation between creativity and material need resonated with his experience.

What the brick tells us, is that creativity dictates how much you need.

Now, back to highschool:

Indirect Defence Against the Ladies

Over the easter break, I had a one hour layover in my sweet-home Ballifornia and decided to kill time with a brisk walk up and down "the street." Covering the main drag in less than half an hour I was diverted down a side street that played host to a fond teenage memory. Albeit one my mum would probably sooner forget.

I was thrilled to see that "New Generation" clothing was still in operation. I am sure it simply cannot be what it once was due to the advent of internet shopping and Ballarat getting the internet and credit cards, but that it was there at all was a thrill to me.

It still faces target more-or-less. So the memory was that my mum desperate to find some "nice clothes" probably necessary for some funeral or something as opposed to the tatty rags I gravitated toward wearing all the time, and after a brief perusal in New Generation clothing, I announced quite publicly that none of the clothes were speaking to me and we were going to head over to Target. My fond memory is my mum's HORRIFIED expression, particularly since it was so illogical. It was not that we were forced to shop at Target, it's that New Generations overpriced range of safe bland clothing was rejected. I think I got an orange t-shirt from Target for $6 that I kept in circulation for the next 6 years.

Nowadays I would probably be more concerned that any of my clothes were made by slaves, but it's not like Target's clothes are slave labour and New Generations are not. 

By the time I graduated year 12 I think my parents had won the battle of buying nice things a couple of times, I never had polarized sunglasses but I did end up with a waterproof rip-curl watch and a cream coloured study desk and...nothing. I was incredibly successful at blocking my parents from getting me "nice things" that I, nor nobody needs.

I'm of the camp that human's are not rational but rationalizing, that our conscious thinks it's the oval office but is in fact the press secretary etc. so while I was wearing Mossimo sneakers because Quan Yeoman's wore them in some Regurgitator clip, most of my intrasexual competition were shelling out for Globe and DC shoes as Blink 182 were ascendant. Had I at the time known about Dunlop Volleys I would have been wearing those. 

I honestly felt constantly under assault to buy what to me was unnecessary shit and felt strongly enough about it, insofar as my parents were willing to buy me unnecessary shit and I didn't have to pay for shit, which again required a very active style of defence to ward my wardrobe against unwelcome gifting. I became quickly, and remain "someone impossible to buy for."

What I only recently clicked when Rory started making his sensible assertions, was that I was also playing an aggressive defence against most of the dating pool in this regard. For sure, the only girl from my own school I dated was M, a fellow school switcher and fashionista that got all her outfits from Op-shops, indeed introduced me to never paying more than $3 for an article of clothing.

The problem with that, is if there's anything that can have me spend money on clothes, it is to attain the inefficiencies of self-expression over fitting in. Custom is often expensive, but op-shops/thrift-stores/vintage stores can enable self-expression at low-low prices, indeed are just about the best way because while every fuckwit can buy a fedora or influencer hat, if you find a conversation piece in an op-shop nobody else can rush out to get the exact same thing.

If I now squeeze out some cognitive empathy though, I need to first recreate the unconscious mind which does not have a perspective, which makes perspective taking difficult.

All we can do is infer, and I'm going to have to drag up the bogeyman of Evolutionary Psychology. I personally am comfortable with evolutionary psychology because I am uncomfortable with special pleading. Certainly there are meaningful differences between the human experience and our nearest relatives like Chimpanzees and Bonobos; but if evolution via natural selection can explain dog psychology, baboon psychology, sheep psychology and all sorts of mammals, it becomes special pleading to say "selection pressures can't explain a kind of adapted human psychology." We are into God made us in His image and all the other mammals spare.

Which is to basically say if the lionesses like a lion not just with an impressive mane but a dark impressive mane as the most expensive to produce in terms of calories, it is likely that humans developed analogous unconscious preferences over the 150,000 years or so we were basically homeless drifters.

And yeah, it is clearly adaptive enough to include stuff by the 20th and 21st centuries. Such that our psychology can do things like associate brand with access to calories. This is the working backwards from an unconscious vague-awareness that if you have children with a high-sexual investment through a non-motile large sex cell like an ovum that takes 9 months to gestate and years to raise in which your own ability to obtain calories through labour will be severely curtailed - you find providers strangely alluring.

Building back from that vague awareness it might translate into a conscious rationalization that Johnny Football hero comes from a context in which he can obtain this seasons line of clothing from New Generation.

Hitting upon a central paradox - the creative premium is real. If you can spend $2,000 on a wedding instead of $20,000 that confers a real financial advantage. Such advantages tend to compound. 

But the disadvantage is going to be, that people using "costly signalling" as an unconscious proxy for "capacity to provide" then anyone who can use creativity to avoid unnecessary costs is likely not showing up on most of the dating pool's radar.

Because alas, somebody might not have the latest stuff because they recognize that it is unnecessary but also because they can't afford it. In my experience, most people are not so adept at cognitive empathy/perspective taking that they can recognize that other people don't value what they do, even highly successful people like employers routinely don't identify that their own employees aren't motivated by quarterly growth so much as surviving a fairly brutal economic environment in safe harbour. 

And I for one was completely OBLIVIOUS. In fact up until just a few weeks ago with Rory giving name to a cluster of phenomena I'd observed all my life, I had basically attributed everything to variations in esteem needs. Which is to say, some people don't need to belong, they have enough personal power to not give a fuck about others opinions. Other people really need to belong, they are acutely sensitive as to what everyone else is doing, such that any time they step off the beaten path they begin to immediately feel anxious and perhaps even existential dread.

But that doesn't really explain why I couldn't get the ladies, whereas the creative premium does somewhat. Highschool age ladies for example, found guys who were good at sport attractive and those jocks often didn't have to give a fuck about what anyone thought of how they dressed or their presentation yet wore the same branded clothing as desperate dipshit guys who were acutely sensitive to how they were esteemed.

A Neat Paradox

Who loses? Believe it or not, my psychologist proscribed me sleeping with more people. 70 to be exact. She challenged me to abandon my self-restricting unrealistic standards and massively increase my number of sexual partners. This big and likely literally hairy goal was no doubt unrealistic. 

There was also the kernal of the right solution in it for me, which was to not approach relationships as a pass/fail but being open enough for them to develop. But insofar as I pursued that 70 target, I was ready to quit after the first low-investment partner and replicated that finding on every subsequent encounter.

Where my creative material premium cost me romantic encounters not just in highschool but throughout my life, there is a case to be made that from my low-sexual investment perspective, I potentially missed out on a lot of experiences with women I'd love to sleep with but hate to talk to. 

A bigger contributor is likely that I also didn't partake in many of the judgement altering substances that can enable two people with nothing in common to hook up for sheer physical attraction.

But alas, much as I don't value the income I derive from a time consuming job I dislike; I don't much value kisses from people I have to hang around with and have painfully disconnected conversations with about a bunch of shit I don't care about.

So from my side, I don't think I lost much, if anything at all, by being such a turnoff/non-entity in this way.

The flipside I don't know. For certain, women who want a big lavish wedding lost nothing by not dating me. I suspect at some threshold, people are incapable of appreciating the creative. There are certainly people who are completely insensitive to anything but brand, failing to recognize that a Mercedes is little more inspiring than a Toyota Camry or Mitsubishi Magna, and that a Rolex is just a fairly generic vaguely gold watch in a world where there's little utility in an extremely reliable time-piece.

Where the losers most likely lie, are the people who connect spending with happiness but either don't, or take too long to notice what Chris Rock articulated so well in his episode of Jerry Seinfeld's "comedians in cars getting coffee":

"I like you, a gourmet meal with an asshole is a horrible meal. A hotdog with an amazing person is an amazing meal, it's all about the company. If we were in a cab, we'd probably be having the same exact conversation."

In many ways, if you think about a fine dining experience, amazing dishes brought out to peck at on a 12 course tasting menue, are frequent and stimulating enough to actually function as outsourcing conversation. A professional is coming in and giving you two stimulus to talk about, which is going to be far more valuable to people who cannot generate interesting conversation organically than those for whom the meal is a distraction/disruption.

So to be clear this:

 Is fine for people who have almost nothing to say to each other. There's no losers in that situation. You are only losers if this:

Is also fine, in which case, the lack of judgement/perception does not bode well for you making the successive decisions that will impact enjoying a good life together. You will probably keep losing by overleveraging your mortgage and purchasing things and hiring people because they are expensive and polished, winding up tied to (as the Onion put it in a recent headline) "a dead end 7-figure job." that you hate, losing your health, becoming depressed etc.

It's a neat little paradox because my creativity driven retardation in signalling that I was a viable provider likely filtered out all the prospective partners I would not want as a partner anyway. Especially the worst losers of all - those who don't just equate happiness with consumption, but aspire to ecstasy. The people who want a boat for their helicopter and other boat, certain in their assumption that if a little stuff makes you a little happy, heaps of stuff therefore makes you ecstatic.

I should also say, in discussing winners and losers. If you gave me a million dollars, like Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld have in multitudes. Nothing changes, it doesn't become a "I may as well" start dating the kind of people that cannot imagine solutions to their problems that don't involve paying through the nose. I would rather not get laid and avoid such company in which case this:

Is also meal wise, a winning outcome for me.

But Wait, There's Hypergamy

Which I have zero confidence to actually write about here in the 21st century. The social contract is very much changing without any real conversation. For example, I still feel that becoming unemployed is a better predictor of a man getting dumped by his girlfriend than a girl getting dumped by her boyfriend.

That said, when I was in my 30s I observed of many women in their 20s that they spent that decade in a relationship with a guy that more reflected a mother-child bond than an adult relationship. Boyfriends with various crippling anxieties that rendered them both emotional and financial burdens, and this completely defies hypergamy.

Furthermore, there's other strange shit that emerges from a growing wealth gap in which with wealthy countries like the former Commonwealth (including USA) as they approach the inequality of poorer countries like Latin America, India, China etc. the dating scene will likely improve, because having zero social mobility will become a norm. At the moment though, women trying to "marry up" are basically competing for an ever dwindling supply of men that will likely out-earn them.

The influencer economy also breaks things somewhat, with companies paying women to promote products to other women like meal kits, and other women paying women to pretend to be the kind of women that in past decades would have been a kept trophy wife. Except now they pay their own way.

My mistake in highschool, and in life, has been that just because I can imagine a great wedding for under $5,000 doesn't mean my prospective and actual partners can. It is a hazardous assumption. In which case, I likely should make some concession to solvency, or perhaps come equipped with a costed wedding package. 

There is also some sense to ye olde "Three months salary" guideline for engagement rings. It is a demonstration of investment, that I mean divorce statistics tell us, has absolutely no baring on the likelihood of a marriage lasting or being happy. Nor does it actually seem that anything is in place to ensure a father supports materially the raising of his own children. But its a fairly reasonable expectation in principle. 

A guy should demonstrate investment.

"You don't want to sleep with me?"

Said Luciana, my all time literary crush. I thought I better conclude with something generally applicable. And that is to point out that the creativity premium is fundamentally real.

Dating aside, people to this day, with all the information we have, are swayed by shiny baubles. The economy is in many ways, attrocious. It has long been known, for example, that most investment fund managers do not beat the market (which is to say, an index fund) while charging more. 

Rory Sutherland talks a lot about the main drivers of consumer behaviour being 1) "habit" doing what has/you've always done and 2) "sensitivity" doing what everyone else is doing. Leading to truly collosal waste.

Adman Bob Hoffman stands by his experience that "fame" is the greatest predictor of success, be it brands or politicians, dovetailing with Rory's habit and sensitivity.

So I'd like to think these observations go beyond that small niche market of women who may rue not sleeping with me in high school, to almost everybody everywhere.

An easy prediction to make, is that we have not seen the last of, nor even the biggest financial scam in history. People will get scammed by conmen in the future. They will also discover their employer was trading insolvent and cannot pay their benefits and entitlements out, which is a shame because they will also discover their employer is not a person that can go to jail, but a legal person - a corporation that always had limited liability towards those it is indebted to. And more basic than that, you will make purchases because the sales pitch was so good and they promised a lot, and the product or service will turn out to be a dud, or unreliable. 

It will all hinge on the same proxy signals as teens dating based on the ability to keep up with seasonal fashion produce: 

The great merit of costly signals, is that some people simply can't afford them. Teenagers often get confused and lack a long term vision, hence the guy who can afford to run a car (or Uber account) and pay for Grill'd burgers and not McDonald's can edge out a peer who can't but in the long run has much much better job prospects and earning potential. So it can still screw up, but less so as we move further and further from a skills and talent based economy to an asset based economy.

The great peril of costly signals, is that buying shit is something literally anybody can do. I do feel it's important progress to be honest in our discourse as to how transactional relationships are. But yeah, anybody who has $250 can drop $250 on a first date. That in essence is the problem. They could be Corey Haim or Corey Feldman, so long as they have $250. 

The same-same with job interviews. Anybody can buy a business shirt and slacks. Any employer can hire an office. Any sales rep can buy cars and watches. 

These signals need to count for less and less in our decision making process. I get that technically a bank could operate out of a garage with plastic lawn furniture now, just as well as a big stone building with doric columns, but psychologically we are just not ready for such realities. I'm not saying they should count for nothing, and you'll notice I'm saying hardly anybody, potentially nobody lost from not dating me in highschool.

But beyond this basic threshold lies everything important. Hence we have to first know what we actually want and what it is worth, then come up with rigorous ways to determine whether anyone can competently deliver that in an exchange of roughly equal value.

Start by looking for downselling. That's a good simple sign. 

The Strangeness (Crushing Guilt and other things)

Some things in life are not easy to talk about, not because they evoke negative emotions that I shy away from but because it is hard to articulate the truly ambivalent. And "ambivalent" itself is difficult, because it once meant "strong contradictory feelings simultaneously" but has come to mean "meh".

In my experience, ambivalence, so things that are not shades of grey, but good and bad simultaneously are for most people incomprehensible. Something about modernity and even postmodernity that makes us feel obliged to rule on the question of good OR bad. Like we are all dialled into a 5-star rating system that forces us to split the difference and call it 2.5~3 rather than both 1-star and 5.

But enough contextless rambling. I had to leave two dogs behind that I became and still am, quite attached to. These are waters I haven't charted, though my previous dog Bess whom I had for 15 delightful years, was a dog that I didn't see for extended periods when I travelled overseas, or had different living arrangements from between high school and graduating University...she was still a family dog with shared custody and I was never forced to abandon her, she like all my previous experiences, died, sad but concrete. 

In the present case, there is immense uncertainty as to if and when I see them again, beyond the propensity of dogs to die prematurely by accident, misadventure or ailment, all of which are likely heightened in a country like Mexico.

I depend on friends and housemates to send me photos, and the whereabouts and custody of my Mexican dogs are hard to keep track of, with my ex being largely uncommunicative, for reasons that are hers, not mine, despite our amicable separation.

All of this is to say, usually I get an update once or twice a month, and there's a delicate art of trust that can break down - where I try to patiently await the next update for as long as I can bare, and they try to send updates often enough so I don't have to pester for them.

That side of it is not that difficult, but something I do to survive a long period of waiting, is go back through old photos and download some onto my phone, though, like watching a replay of an AFL match, it is not the same thing is seeing how the dogs are doing today, know what I'm saying?

Which brings me to this photo:

Now you may notice, it is not a photo of a dog, but a person. My friend J who is now deceased via suicide. This was a photo he took and posted himself, and you know if you wanted to torture me for...well not eternity, but some good while, you would trap me Clockwork Orange style, having to look at it.

I can look at it now with a kind of serene detachment, I can project something...else...than I was first inclined to, like this is the slightly knitted brow of someone trying to align there own face in their phone screen to take a picture without producing a double chin. 

I used to look at it and assume more context, which lead me to project an intense loneliness onto my friend, which in turn evokes in me a crushing guilt - begging the question - not as a misunderstanding of the fallacy, but as a desperate cry for release from shame and self-recrimination - as to where the fuck I was, when he was feeling this lonely. And in my particular case, it was more than once that J gave me the call and I answered, until he didn't call me or anyone. 

Now, amongst all the people who lost J, I count myself among the lucky who knew about his earlier suicide attempts and how serious they were and that they were most certainly not cries for help but just dumb luck that he survived them and gave us more time. I learned after his eventual death that many had no idea there'd been extra time.

I've written much about my processing J's death, and so I don't want to write much more, because its actually kind of embarrassing despite the best of intentions, that in the fullness of time I suspect I have among the least to offer. Indeed, particularly off in Mexico where I luxuriated in processing, I feel often like I am the last to move on, the straggler, the guy who got stuck, is stuck and the things to process keep piling up, including los dos perritos.

So as an artefact of my ongoing process, I would just offer this. The crippling guilt I feel when a photo forces me to imagine this man I love, alone and lonely, just somewhere in front of an uninspiring ad for a bank, "waiting for no-one" as Dave Graney somehow captured. You know, it's imagination, probability says J almost certainly at some point felt the crushing loneliness I imagine, just not necessarily then, not necessarily captured by the above photo. That is my shit, read into/projected onto it.

But hold a mirror up to that emotional shit in me, and there is in equal part, my almost unbridled rage that J killed himself and left me, in a self-conception sense that is as real a sense as balance or proprioception, all alone in the universe. In many senses it is true to point to me as a complete failure of the grieving process, because I feel tethered by a black cured and desiccated umbilical chord to a corpse irretrievably in the abyss. 

One that means I have to dwell around the event horizon of the abyss, because a part of me is dead, and it's as annoying and distasteful to me as it is to those who love me and try to love me - but they, unlike me have the added burden of not knowing as I know myself, that I have no plans to say 'fuck it' and jump into that abyss, so it all seems rather morbid to observers and all I can do is my best effort at the universal shrug that says "wut?".

Sure the abyss promises that next-next-level peace of infinite unconsciousness, but I love it here too much, experience feels like the only game in the universe.

I had a dream I was able to tell a fellow survivor about, where I was trying to tie myself a noose from the chord that held my basketball shorts up, and I was struggling with the task until someone came to ask me if I was okay, and in my dream I was finally able to express that rage at J's having abandoned us, and after the dream I realized I was carrying that rage and needed to express it. Even to a proxy in a dream. 

(Incidentally, I also realized that the dream most likely came from the fact that my black brand jordan basketball shorts that I wear most often, were J's and came with no drawstring, so I've had to source one and rethread it myself, a process that is long and tedious and gives one plenty of time to contemplate the possibility that the original drawstring was confiscated so he couldn't use it to hang himself, hence the dream.)

So that's where I'm at and there's enough distance now to say I am well beyond the steep part of the grieving curve and I have no idea when I'll pass the next milestone or if there is even a next one. I am open to surprises and I kind of trust my brain to process what it can. What you should keep in mind is that I no longer trust my brain to know where I'm at with this, and whether it can tell the difference between progress and regress.

Bringing me to pictures I dug up while trawling old chats for photos of my dogs:

Blogger and Usma

Now, truth be told I'm probably as doughy right now as I am in this picture. The other thing is, inanimate dogs often look depressed on account of how much sleeping and lying around they do between the prospects of a walk, food, or best of both worlds - a walk to the kitchen or local taco stand and all it's leavings. So I'm never bothered by how sad dogs look in photos that actually have really great lives, that is, after all, how they get you.

What strikes me is that much as I project a kind of lonely despair onto J, I look at this photo and see an intensely unhappy self. A self I don't really recognize or recall, and as such, this old photo seems like supernatural quackery to me, like old fake double exposures that try to prove the existence of ghosts. This feels like sadness projected onto me, which it is, by me. For all I can guess, I was likely happily singing some song to Usma and then looked up to the photo and this expression was captured in momentary transition. It isn't the long hard stare of a broken and defeated man.

Which at least, I can say, it wasn't. I don't know what happened to me in Mexico, beyond vague descriptors that being approximately right, are better than being precisely wrong. Things like "stagnation" better capture, without providing any real insight, anything else I can articulate about particularly my last two years in Mexico.

And again, it's hard to talk about because those last two years were honestly some of the best of my life.

I am still partial to articulating it as "I never stopped trying I just stopped functioning" and I infer this from far more objective occurrences than my actual lived experience.

For example, when it came time to move out into a halfway house, because when breaking up involves half the planet Earth in distance and potential deportation, it is good to make sure breaking up is the right thing to do. Based on my personal history of breakups, I very much anticipated a break-down. In the lead up to moving day, I had had my parents use new covid telehealth developments to fudge a mental health care plan, booked in a telehealth appointment with my psychologist as the first thing to do at my new bachelors accomodation, and I'd also lined up close friends and family as my mental health safety net. I moved out to live with my first and oldest Mexican friends, and lived within walking distance of my old apartment and the dogs. 

The anticipated breakdown didn't come though. The hardest thing was the sudden absence of dogs in my daily life, and they had really been my main mental health lines as both I and my partner had struggled with the inertia and stagnation of our situation.

Instead, I felt palpable relief. Like a knot I hadn't even known was there between my shoulder blades released, as in the failure of our relationship, I was relieved of tremendous pressure I had just been coping with, constantly, possibly for years.

I lost weight, got in shape, cut my hair off all relatively quickly. A matter of months after I had struggled for years. It was also not a result of a depressive loss of appetite, but some renewed vigour. I ate roticery chicken, pizza, steak, burgers, burritos. I had ice-cream or agua frescas every day. I got visitation to the dogs, and when I couldn't, I still enjoyed my life. About the only major change was that I would go to the movies alone because I wasn't going to miss "The Meg 2" not when tickets are under $5, but I did stop buying popcorn and drinks, like how I was raised.

The last obstacle was pushing back against my parents desire to bring me back from, in their words "purgatory" ASAP. To implore them to let me have a few months, that ended up pretty close to six, to recover, to acclimatize rather than just go full system shock. As most of my friends already know, when the culture shock was loaded on, it was pretty tremendous for me.

With that out of the way, I got better. I don't want to make any hard and fast generalizations. For me at least, my weight is a good indicator of my mental health. Obstacles to me staying in shape are more often emotional than the next-best-candidate being injury. 

Maybe I'm reflective now, because I've seen myself in others like bookends of my experience. Taking on responsibilities you can't handle, and shutting down. In highschool I borrowed this kid's sunglasses for a shitty high school production at an offsite and lost them, having at that time no conception that anyone would spend $400 in Y2K money on sunglasses. I had no income, and once lost-and-found didn't turn them up, I basically was responsible but couldn't do anything, just wound up with a protracted situation. 

The thing is, the kid I had economically deprived was a nice guy, the situation was unambiguous but it only resolved by me getting to a breaking point after just living with a baseline level of stress that spiked as we came into each others orbits and then over time I eventually broke and had to fess up to my parents that I'd screwed up and they bailed me out like good middle-class parents do. I had no idea that was an option, I just felt screwed due to my just not having money.

I've seen people take on a project at work that they just don't know how to do, or can't do for lack of resources, and subsequently don't do it. It's not hidden that it isn't getting done, it just goes on for a protracted period beyond anyone's forecast. 

And I'd like to say that my own experiences have made me more sensitive to the very real emotional obstacles that prevent people, such as myself and others, from functioning, but alas no. I am only conscious this is a thing, but it took me 3 weeks of getting frustrated by someone's inaction before they alluded to an emotion, before the greatly depreciated penny dropped for me.

Fortunately in that case, the emotional obstacle was easy to overcome, it was pretty much a George Costanza "Downtown" project situation, where the emotional obstacle was just fear to admit that they don't know how to get started.

My own case, same same but different, and just larger. What killed me was how to account for all the time that passed. I would look at my life and feel incredibly busy (also clearly stressed based on the knot between my shoulders that was so omnipresent I didn't notice it until it released) without producing anything. Even this is not true, I published a subscription based substack serial fiction with art that fell over because I couldn't hit my production deadlines, I made a season of a podcast and picked up a bunch of new skills...

It's probably worth a diversion and comparing then to now. There was this obvious elephant on my back back then which was the need to get a stable source of income in order for us to progress in life. It was the bottleneck through which everything else was held up. It pressurized my environment and it was not only important but urgent.

I'm convinced that the problem I had, has a solution to this very day, I just couldn't solve it. Evidently there are people with the skills and know-how, that have invested the time in the right places to build up the contacts, to just freelance from anywhere in the world. There is also a path from where I was to there, that I just could not navigate.

Furthermore, with so much effort riding on it, I didn't even know how to try, fail and learn. I didn't at that time even know basics of networking, like you don't ask your network for a job. I approached it in a manner where I was bound to get rejected, and with so much at stake, the fear of rejection became crippling. I couldn't use what meagre network I had, because I couldn't face using it up.

So I had this thing that I needed to do and was supposed to be doing and was clearly the number one priority. That meant everything else I could do, that might produce social goods, or even personal goods, became procrastination.

I maintain the difference between procrastination and rest is solely the felt obligation that you should be doing something else. Hence a videogaming experience differs greatly depending on whether you have an assignment due at the end of the week or you are beginning a weekend. 

And I say "you" but I'll come back to that, eventually. Because I had said I was comparing then and now. One of the harder aspects of coming back, was that my parents basically applied the same kind of pressure to me as had been so constantly debilitating (without my conscious knowledge) when I was living in Mexico. As such, in 2024 I had work, I was repairing myself financially and quickly, it just wasn't enough work or the kind of work that would relieve that pressure. As of 2025, I got full-time work that uses my degrees and nobody times my breaks or asks me why I was three minutes late etc. 

That is sufficient to take the pressure off, and though I am not publishing, I am drawing and creating again and I will start ekeing out the kind of social and personal goods I want to create regardless. I just don't get to work on them when I'm under pressure, indeed I can't.

Now though I feel the time poverty of full time work accutely, I am producing more, because what time I do have is my own. There is no longer a perceived elephant on my back telling me I really should be spending any and all time on the number one priority.

Diversion over, there's probably something worth articulating and getting down, if only for myself. Two things actually, where counter-intuitively I wonder if I fared worse, because of these traits.

Many people, if not most, in the situation I was in, would have reached their own breaking point fairly quickly. I remember once being part of an office that gathered round to wish a young woman leaving the company all the best on her adventure of a lifetime to Europe. It was a big deal, she was much beloved and had been with the company longer than I at that point despite her youth and off she went on a planned 6 month trip.

She returned after 3 months, after blowing through her budget buying European designer purses and what-not. 

Finance was only one component of it, but I prolonged my own situation by managing it really well. I stuck to a budget and from the get-go knew I may not be able to secure income on any predictable time-frame and my savings needed to last. Which they did for like 2 and a bit years. The bigger things were the cope though. I was really good at cope and thus didn't crack.

I sometimes wonder, that the people who can't cope and need to hit the bottle or something stronger, transmit a much louder cry for help that would have actually spared me, perhaps even prompted the competent intervention and investment that could have solved that bottle-neck problem.

On balance, I more recently suspect that people who break-down under the pressure and don't cope in healthy sustainable ways, just run too bigger risk. I suspect more often the case where someone long-term unemployed starts day-drinking in bed instead of embracing domestic work, exercise and intellectual stimulation, probably finds their life fall apart even further.

I mean, J's cries for help were as loud and clear as physically possible, and the investment in intervention was probably as large as can be reasonably expected. J has been dead 7 years now.

In a similar vein I was also getting the feedback from my support network that I was coping really well. Something that metaphorically killed me was that I kept carrying the self-imposed expectation that I could figure it out, kind of like with my art career, a story that I propagate, but also gets reflected back to me, is the idea that if anyone can do it out of the available known person's it's me. I am a frontiersman.

Now, what is buried, is that most of the time I was tremendously happy. That is not just how I remember it but how I experienced it. All the pressure was a question not of quality, but sustainability. It's another post, but I can appreciate how for others, including my partner, what we had was not enough.

But an acute point, is that necessity is subjective. Are credit cards and cars necessities? I recently had to research the depressing business model of personal finance and for many people, a car is life itself, and they likely are not wrong. They are at the mercy of an economy and urban planning that subsidizes those wealthy enough to afford a car at the expense of everyone else who cannot. I'm middle-class in the UK sense, which is to say upper class. I got an education that allows me to apply to the jobs that don't even require a valid driver's license and aren't located anywhere where one needs a car, or to live at their work to be gainfully employed.

For many their highest qualification is not a high-school certificate but their drivers license. They live in a place where their local council has provided them the solitary options of driving around the town from home to warehouse or office-park, or catching a bus into town, switching to another bus back out of town to get to work. The infinite recourse of the wealthy, is to assume such arrangements are karmic retribution for a lack of effort put into education and training. If poor people could just do maths, including depreciating the vehicle, they would realize it's crazy not to get up at 5am and take the bus to and from work, instead opting for a 30 minute drive having gotten 6 hours sleep and prepared your kids school lunches. In such circumstances, the car becomes a necessity, and so then too does the personal loan they can secure with their bad credit history.

My judgement is on the inept and incompetent people that designed the infrastructure that subsidizes the rich and taxes the poor so unfairly. But that's another post, that I'm not going to write, because this video is better.

Where the fuck was I? Oh yeah, I had everything I need to be happy. I was living in a good place, with a good partner, two dogs, two cats and it was virtually impossible not to be happy, there and now. The only question was the trade offs available to sustain such happiness indefinitely.

At some point, though I tend to undervalue what I did achieve, the daily self-soothing necessary to overcome that baseline stress and anxiety that the present would one day run out and I'd find myself in a future without those fundamental ingredients of happiness (which I did) meant that I got up, made the bed most days, scrubbed the yard, went to the gym or ran, showered, walked the dogs to the shops or market, ate some sugary snacks, got ingredients for lunch, prepped lunch, ate lunch, washed dishes that would take me through to 1 or 2pm, shortly afterwards my partner would finish her 8 hour work shift and we most likely would watch shows we liked together, then she would go out to one of her myriad commitments and I would get between 4~6 hours to do unsupervised production of whatever.

By the end though, I'd need more self-soothing or self-medicating behaviour during those times. There was a lot going on, it's hard to break down, but there was also the awareness that are relationship was headed inevitably toward collapse so there was actually a lot of conscious enjoyment of my partners time and attention while I still had it. 

I'll try articulating it this way. My dog Bess died from her Kidney's packing it in, more or less at exactly 15 years. We were able to use medical intervention to keep her alive and feeling well enough to put her down at home when the whole family could be there, but from go-to-woe she died within a week. 

While she remained alive but we knew she would die, it erected a kind of prison that her death relieved me of, because I didn't want her to die, and I wanted as much quality time as possible. But making the most of the time you have remaining takes work.

So I don't have any diagnosis, and despite lining up telehealth appointments with my psychologist wanting to talk about what happened to me, my psychologist assumed my sessions would want to address the breakup and the same issues I had seen her for in the past. It took a session and a half for me to say I wasn't worried about the break up process and the future, I wanted to figure out what happened to me in terms of my inability to function over the previous two years.

I had a sneaking suspicion that I had some form of high-functioning depression, alas that's a self-diagnosis and pungent bait for setting people off on a self-righteous public awareness campaign of a condition people assume they have. The same phenomena satirized as "asymptomatic tourette's" in English Teacher. All I know is something, likely within the normal range of human emotion and likely within the range of normal reactions to the environment I was in, happened that stopped me functioning as I can.

The only other candidate abnormality I frequently revisit, is something like the "ordinary half-life of grief-provoked-enlightenment" which is, most frequently expressed as the phenomena of even the least insightful and thoughtful people you know, when bereft saying "It puts everything in perspective doesn't it." These people are noticing that yesterday they were incredibly dialled in to the cashier at the supermarket not accepting their coupons for 50c off chuck steak, and today that seems trivial because somebody they know, love and possibly respect are dead and they'll never see them again.

The normal thing to do is to level out the chemical-emotional experience and snap back to caring about trivia again. I mean there's something to "manifesting" as an observable phenomena. I'd just sooner not read "The Secret" and observe that it's more that due to generalized incompetence the people who tend to get things are the people who tend to ask. People are hired because a vacancy needs to be filled, far more often than they are hired for reaching or exceeding a competence threshold. People tend to get sales by asking for a sale, and asking repeatedly, not because they successfully understand a problem that needs to be solved and propose an exchange of different goods of roughly equal value to each respective party.

In many ways, not having perspective is adaptive, at least in the short run. Because as much as you believe in "don't ask, don't get" and whatever other expressions get to the core of "manifesting" I suspect most people who believe in all this materialistic wisdom from "location, location, location" to "grit" to "lean in" to "hussle" and whatever, it is my experience that very few refute the observation that almost nobody on their death bed regrets not spending more time at the office.

I think an area in which I am retarded, is that I take this forecast to heart. That when I die, and indeed now, I don't regret that my dogs and my partner got my best energy, such that it was, day-in-day-out for three years, when all that time I could have been providing customer service to travel insurance policy holders as a remote worker for 38 hours a week and had an even nicer place to live. 

Nor do I want to cop-out with "well it was what it was." Should I get another opportunity at such a happiness factory again, I should wish to sustain it for longer. Ideally much longer. A full terrier life-span at least.

Bringing me at last, to all of you. So introduction over. Let's talk about the Strangeness.

The Strangeness:

This year one of my goals is to beat the loneliness epidemic statistic, which says most men over 30 or something have less than 10 close friends. At the time I heard it, I was like "I have 3" (and I'm assuming family don't count). 

By 3 I meant 3 people that return my calls or messages, and that call me such that we stay in touch, it isn't just me reaching out every 3, 6 or 12 months. 

Now my thing is, its not for lack of trying. So I was coming across this strange phenomena where I just couldn't get people to return my calls, and it went right back to when I relocated to Mexico.

Something that prevented me from addressing it, was my recognition of the hypocrisy, the thought crime, of even thinking my friends had abandoned me when obviously by packing up and moving to Mexico I clearly abandoned them first.

I also marvelled at the sheer misfortune of it. I do not have infinite energy to reach out and connect with people, I tend to pursue my friends more or less one at a time. So if one dicked me around with scheduling a video call for 3 months, it meant I spent 3 months lining up one video call. That basically means if everyone is that hard to schedule with, I can have 4 video call social interactions a year, because I just don't have the emotional reserves to deal with not even rejection but the tedium of chaotic friend(s) plural. 

It was even true of my Mexican friends. Karen, who I met as an organizer of a meet-up for artists and was one of my closest friends in my first year in GDL, and whom I stayed in touch with during lock-down, took 3 months to catch up with upon my return, and it took so much chasing from my end that I never bothered again.

So there remains this question of "did I just get unlucky with prioritizing first the friends that were real social bottlenecks?" on this front, I don't really believe in luck, and that was the beginning of what I call "The Strangeness"

Artist Gaetan de Seguin displayed on someone's smart phone (fittingly)

The strangeness is the ghost-world feeling of not so much everyone being dead-to-me but for me, being dead-to-everyone. Now, I wanted to write this post around new years, and my take would have been much less confident, but because I did a bunch of new years messages first, I amazingly heard from a bunch of people that had been ghosting me for half a decade, so I can write with some confidence that the status quo I'm calling "the strangeness" is being dead-to-eachother. A general withdrawedness.

I haven't ruled out mundane explanations though, those being:

1. The problem is me. I'm an arsehole and going to Mexico gave most of my friends the opportunity to realize that, and how nice life was once they'd acclimatized to life without me.
2. We in general tend not to appreciate how much social work, work and school does for us. Most of our closest friends tend to be people we've been forced to spend time with. We find brothers and sisters in arms, and when you aren't being paid to hang out, you tend to naturally drift apart. I would not be so sensitive to this drifting apart if I'd gained work and subsequently new friends to help me forget my old friends.
3. A bunch of my friends have kids, and are basically going to be walking zombies for the next 18 or so years.

These mundane explanations don't quite explain phenomena like the precipitous drop-off in facebook usage, which remains the largest social media platform by a longshot. Perhaps the rise of TikTok is the same phenomena really because there is something hyper-avoidant in TikTok and it's generalised contentless content.

The mundane explanations also don't predict well my experiences of actually eventually catching up with those who do reply. They can't really explain why shit takes so long to organize, or they do explain it as a startlingly common phenomena - of being unable to face socializing themselves. It's not me, it's been them. Texts and messages roll in and they just can't answer them. The phone rings, they see the number and can't bring themselves to connect the call.

I hate this, because I hated the people during lock-down talking about a mental health crisis being caused. Alas, I think the most likely, most uniform candidate for "The Strangeness" is the lingering effects of the Covid year(s). 

My problem is, the people yelling themselves red in the face about dictator Dan's lockdowns causing a mental health crisis, I found, from direct experience, totally disengenuous. They more often impressed upon me that they believed through the power of self belief they were immune to Covid, that they didn't really care about the people who could and would die from Covid because they basically thought they were low-life scum or other-people's-grandparents, and they were mostly outraged that lockdowns prevented them from going to the pub for friday night drinks.

I mean, maybe it was genuine, and these people were so mentally unwell, that if they didn't get the friday night drinks in, they were going to fall apart. Unfortunately, the lockdowns don't explain why I saw this strangeness in Guadalajara, that had no lockdowns, just masses of deaths. 

I have to concede though, I think Covid did cause a mass mental-health crisis. I think it broke the social contract, or the illusion of control or something. Something has happened that has rendered most people's day-to-day existence as having a sense of persistent meaninglessness. Perhaps the practical demonstration that we are not masters of our own destiny, but largely dependent on a large and rudderless mass of strangers and which way they all tend to herd.

I don't know, but I'd like to know. It's kind of like, vitally important to me, because of how much I beat myself up over my personal failings during my Mexico years. When I get out of myself and look around, it actually does seem plausible that actually most people have experienced an era, similar to myself, regardless of whether they are employed and/or raising kids, have bought a house and are paying things off.

A big damage done to me by the lockdowns is that I was forced to conclude that I can't trust my neighbours. We aren't a community all looking out for one another. That's both huge and sad. 

What I'd be reluctant to conclude is that we are facing a "crisis of meaning" and not just because Charlie Church's jump all over this with the pretense that some scripture they identify with contains meaning. It cannot be a crisis of meaning because we've never had it. It is more likely that we're having some kind of crisis of adjustment, after what I hope is an enormously positive ending of myopia. I think people have likely gained wisdom but not agency, because the economies we live in are largely environments of habit. 

I don't know it's very strange, I know too little, that's for sure so consider this sharing, a mere first step.

Subjective Incompetence in Motion

I'm hoping to bang out a quick post here, including embedding some videos I'm sure I've shared before. So let's get to it.

Many years ago, Stephen Fry was hosting BBC program "QI" whose tweely named "elves" had caught up to the quite interesting subject of the Dunning Kruger effect and it culminated in Fry asking the panel "how do you know if you are incompetent?" 

Now the answer is, that you can't, and this isn't what this post is about. It is about what it feels like to be incompetent, and for that I turn to Japanese motion picture tradition of portraying martial arts onscreen. Starting with the climactic battle of Sanjuro, Akira Kurosawa's follow up to Yojimbo which Sergio Leone used unapologetically for the basis of "A Fistful of Dollars.":

Now I can't speak for you, but speaking for myself, I've watched this scene at least a dozen times and each time I experience it as not being able to perceive what happened. How does Sanjuro, the one with the long sideburns played by Toshiro Mifune, manage to draw his sword and kill the opponent?

If you watch it on youtube, you can slow down playback speed in settings to see that it comes down to an economy of movement on the victors part, hence he can appear to draw late/second but win the duel. This however, it should be kept in mind, is still illusion. Choreography, plus an effect that actually was a mechanical failure causing the blood to spray rather than trickle, that Kurosawa decided to keep in the final cut and has subsequently become a trope of Japanese animated films and even video games.

But don't get too absorbed in that trivia, I want to move us along to what I keep coming back to in terms of masterfully capturing, what I at least, feel like when incompetent. I'm talking Mugen vs Kariya in Samurai Champloo:

Now, if you need the context this is one of the ultimate match-ups in the whole series of Samurai Champloo, and the guy who comes across as a completely outclassed rank-amateur in the above clip has previously been established as one of the strongest martial artists in the entire fictitious universe. Almost a scene using the trope of the Worf effect.

But if it is, and it certainly is a candidate because Kariya kind of comes out of knowhere, a literal ringer adversary for the plot, it is done masterfully.

What I love is that Kariya is one of the visually least-interesting character designs in the whole animated series. Compared to Mugen with his unusual clothes and hair, pirate cutlass style sword and reinforced wooden sandles, Kariya wears drab browns, looks like he's in his autumn years and has no impressive physique and all of the visual interest comes from what he does.

Or rather...how the animators convey his character through visuals.

What I keep thinking about are the slo-mo sequences where Kariya's prowess is presented from Mugen's perspective, as supernatural powers. Mugen loses track of Kariya's sword movements first, but we experience this as the sword vanishing, then reappearing at an impossibly different angle in our peripheral vision. A magic sword? Or does Mugen simply not understand what is happening?

Then I love the nice touch of the switched perspective, where Mugen conceales himself behind the sacks of what I assume to be beans, and starts tossing them at Kariya. We get Kariyas perspective and nothing supernatural is happening at all. In fact we just impassively watch Mugen reappear through a smoke screen of beans to be easily dodges and sent sprawling.

Then it is back to Mugen's experience, and you can see it but we get some strange sequence where the opponents trade places, and at first we get some ambiguous visual effects that allude to Mugen finding something strange about Kariya's movements, then the most supernatural effect where Kariya seemingly turns into a ghost, like those white guys with dreadlocks in the Matrix: Reloaded, and passes bodily through Mugen before ending the fight dismissively.

This to me, is what I would point to if asked "what does it feel like to be incompetent?"

It feels spooky, confusing, unsettling. It feels to me, like what Mugen is seeing fighting Kariya. Unlike with the live action Sanjuro, slowing it down will yield no insight, though we can imagine getting a third parties perspective on the conflict and I would assume - we do not see Kariya teleport his sword out of his hands, and we do not see Kariya turn into a ghost and pass through Mugen.

Indeed, once Jin starts fighting Kariya, these effects disappear, or at least become much more subtle. Kariya just seems to kind of teleport around the animation frames from where Jin attacks to where Jin isn't attacking. 

Bringing me to Shane. Shane being a film where Alan Ladd plays the titular role, and Jack Palance plays the black hat muscle of the main antagonist. He is essentially brought in to town by the big rancher to kill off the collective of small-holders or "sodbusters" by goading them into drawing.

Shane's iconic quick draw scene between Palance's character and Stonewall, captures for me the scary reality of being incompetent - which is that incompetence can terrifyingly not feel like anything at all until it is too late, where we might get a couple of seconds at most to feel confusion and remorse, certainly not in any intelligible capacity:

Mugen is clearly just dumb-lucky to get to walk away from his fight with Kariya alive. And let's face it, outside of interacting with lethal amounts of momentum - ie. vehicles and heavy equipment, most of our incompetence in the modern era doesn't manifest in life-or-death situations. (At least not for us directly.)

I experience it in things like personal interractions, where I am left with a vague uneasiness that something I said was the wrong thing to say. 

Perhaps an easy context to explore it through is the job interview. Until recently, there were questions asked in job interviews, that I just don't understand why they are asked like "What are your salary expectations?" I had received the advice initially that the correct answer is "market rates." Which maywell work in a context like Australia, where we have government websites that allow us to find the award rate for various job categories.

I have since learned more about this question that frankly perplexed me, as in my experience I was typically interviewed for jobs that had advertised a salary. So why the fuck are you asking me? A question that confused me like Kariya's disappearing sword - I thought the ad said $55k? Am I supposed to ask for more? Am I supposed to say something less? I've heard some recruiters ask "what is the minimum salary you would accept?" That's even more confusing, because aren't I think tacitly agreeing already to accept the minimum?

I do not possess the competence now to give advice on how to answer the salary question. I think what most resonates with me is the general advice of - most job interviews are ultimately testing for preparation, so prepare by researching salaries like the aforementioned government website, the other general piece of advice is that if you are asked a direct question you should give a direct answer. People hate politicians. 

Beyond that though, I am still incompetent. I would like to spend more time on the other side of the interview table to understand how this question is useful, why it cannot instead, for example, be a statement of salary expectations by the party that will be paying the salary.

It only makes sense in an executive capacity, where for example, Starbucks needs to figure out how to lure away the CEO of Chipotle to magically make them successful again like Chipotle. That situation it's like yeah - what would it take for you to come leave your job with a successful company to come work for a company that is going down the toilet?

But entry level positions at a bank? I don't get it. There's a bunch of clerks they already pay pretty much the same thing, and you are hiring another one onto the team. So you pretty much know what you are willing to pay, so why get me to guess what you pay from the outside? I am going to guess what you said in your ad. Is this a bait and switch? I can't tell because I am doing an interview with a video?

And this is probably what distinguishes the video clip from Shane, from the video clip from Yojimbo. In both cases, someone appears to draw first, but somehow too slowly. In Shane, it's even more brutal because there's this drawn out pause between losing the drawing contest, and getting shot. 

But as a 3rd party, we get these clues as to how the duel is going to go. Jack Palance is standing on an elevated wooden walkway, the sodbuster Stonewall is standing and sometimes slipping in mud, at a clear disadvantage. Jack is insulting him, for some reason he can't just murder Stonewall, he needs Stonewall to draw, but he signals his intentions to murder Stonewall by putting on his shooting glove when they are both already in the position with feet planted ready for the duel. Stonewall could presumably still awkwardly walk away, all he has to do is not draw.

There's some kind of verbal dance going on and Jack Palance is in control of all of it. Stonewall conforms to his plan, likely because he just doesn't understand what is happening. It's kind of like when Charity muggers first started appearing in downtowns around the world, walking up and sticking out their hands to strangers asking in an inevitably British accent if we had a couple of minutes to chat about the environment. 

The unfortunate thing about charity muggers, is that they were asking for $30 a month in direct debit payments to some ostensibly worthwhile cause presumptively addressed by a particular organization, instead of killing people with the cold psychopathy of Jack Palance's character. That could have continued for years, but instead people learned to turn cold and ignore their impulse to treat strangers with the benefit of the doubt, charity muggers successfully corroding the all important system of manners that holds society together.

Anyway, I've crapped on long enough and hopefully between job interviews and charity muggers, I've related the motion picture depictions of incompetence to real life experiences, and you will either share or not share, my subjective experience of being incompetent.

The "C" World

I've been thinking, as long time, or even one time, readers might assume I do, constantly, rendering this comma-laden opening sentence un-newsworthy; but let me get back to the follow on from that first ',': a lot about "C-students" recently.

But first I need to address an important point, people may assume this title to be a reference to the so-called "C-word" which is cunt, and I am a serious adult that may have grown up a short walk from numerous private schools, catholic schools and parklands and wetlands in Ballarat, but I got out enough to learn how to have "cunt" roll off my tongue without self-scandalizing at the appropriate age of however old kids are by grade-4 and I'm fucken proud of my Balifornian heritage and as such, need to make it clear that if you think I am alluding to cunts, you are mistaken, because if I'm alluding to a/some cunt(s), you will cunten-well know it.

And of course, my mid-90s heritage has no doubt turned off, via-ad-hominems some of the psychographic markets that would most benefit from hearing what I have to say from here out. But c'est-la-vie-cunts I guess. I am of course referring to the very common grading system in some primary schools and most prominently secondary schools the anglosphere over. "C" usually means a score of 50.

Now, a very safe way I could theoretically have introduced this concept is via the truistic heuristic:

"On average, people are average."

Which is to say, I may be above average in terms of something not very important like vocabulary, being someone who will eventually get the joke "eschew obscurantism" once it has been pointed out to me that it is meant to be a joke. And I'm probably now above average as-far as second language speakers of Japanese and Spanish are, but once you start adding "subjects" or fields of expertise, with the simple example of more languages like Mandarin, Cantonese, German, Italian, French, Greek, Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodian, Indonesian, Arabic, Pashtu, Finnish, Gaelic and Welsh etc. I conform to the global average - which is no ability at all to speak most languages.

 The significance of C-students, is based on two qualities:

1. It is the minimum grade with which one can pass, to be deemed "sufficiently knowledgeable" or "competent" to require no further investment in that student.
2. It is the grade at which the ambiguity of what a student actually knows is maximised, because they know roughly half of the subject.

I wish to now expand upon this second point. If you know someone is a D-student in a given subject, then we know that they mostly don't understand the subject. Likewise, with a B-student, we know that they mostly know the subject. More extreme, with F and A students, we can be even more confident that they don't and do know most of the subject respectively. With a C-student though, for any given aspect of that subject they may or may not know what they are talking about with roughly the same odds as flipping a coin.

There is no doubt, some logic to our education systems setting the threshold of competence at 50%. This logic may however, go all the way back to the industrial revolution. 

Furthermore, we should consider that in the context of education, there's a steady escalation of difficulty as kids progress K-12. Such that, a grade one student getting a C in maths (Australia, the commonwealth, cunts) may leave us guessing as to whether they can handle adding or subtracting, but a year 10 student getting a C in Math's methods leaves us guessing as to whether they struggle with locating asymptotes in quadratic equations or solving simultaneous equations (the latter, in my case, because of the bullshit 4 decimal answers that were supposedly "correct") but we can now safely assume that any and all students who've made it to year 10 maths methods, can handle adding, subtracting, multiplication and division by now, though they could still be fucking up BOMDAS/BODMAS (which if you are wondering, doing the division before the multiplication or vice versa is not the fuckup, forgetting either acronym is where they fuck up).

So it is now time to leave grade school as I did oh so long ago, in a place far away where the sensitive just had to flinch and cling to their "tuck shop" money when an exciting girl wearing Kappa pants on a bmx with poorly applied mascara and bleached hair with red-black regrowth asked if you were "a rich cunt" despite them having the $10 to spend on a pack of cigarettes from Poonie's milk-bar and $2.50 to spend on a 600ml bottle of coke that you wondered if they backwashed and wondered if they might abandon the last flat, luke-warm, saliva infused 50ml languishing in the 4 bevelled plastic nubs of the PET-adapted iconic rocket-ship bottle shape down by the tracks where a young man blushing uncontrollably as his limbic and endocrine system worked hard to confuse terror and arousal could somewhat one-sidedly experience the hygiene equivalent of kissing the terrifying and exciting girls from the other side of the tracks, because they were indeed "a rich cunt" and would never risk drinking the discarded dregs of coke because it most likely was discarded by a 50 year old man with a substance control problem where the substance was clearly not caffeine or sugar but some kind of amphetamine because they didn't finish their cokes.

Yes time to leave behind the good-old-days where girls didn't need tumblr memes or tik-tok influencers to convince them that doing their own "stick-and-poke" DIY underage tattoos were a good idea, and out into the real world. The fucken C-world.

The C-world

By which I mean it is simple. There are these shows I don't watch but have certainly heard about called "Dragon's Den" and "Shark Tank" where people present their ideas to wealthy investors hoping that some or all of the various sharks and dragons will invest in their idea to get their business off the ground or to the next level.

I propose a simple hypothetical exercise - have one of those arcade prize machine claws come down from the heavens, pick up the net worth of the sharks/dragons and have them deposit it on the Joe-nobodies that are pitching their business ideas of variable quality.

I predict two things will happen - the first is that more-than-zero of the contestants in suddenly becoming high-net-worth will discover they would not invest in their own ideas, and instead feel a sudden desire to talk to a financial planner about a diversified portfolio of stocks, bonds and real assets with a view to minimizing taxes. 

The second thing will be that the Sharks and Dragons, suddenly devoid of any capital to invest in a startup will have to pitch investment ideas to random millionaires and their ideas are likely to be as rejectable as the average contestant. 

Put simply, the pitching and catching relationship goes in the direction of people with no money to people with lots of money. The starting positions are unlikely to be based on meritocracy.

For the simplest example, just watch enough of Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares. Not necessarily ubiquitous, but a very common thread through abysmally failing restaurants is that the people who own the restaurant try to run the restaurant.

There is a management adage you will almost certainly hear if you spend at least 90 days learning about management:

"I hire smart people and get out of their way". Lee Iacocca.

You may remember Lee from Ford vs. Ferrari, the guy that interferes with the race finish for publicity so Christian Bale does not officially win Le Mans, the talented person Lee Iacocca helped hire.

This is the point of living in C-world. It is the reality we live in. Many people will be shocked to discover how untalented and downright mediocre many of the best compensated and most influential people in our society are. 

This phenomena that I challange ordinary working class people to go out and debunk, is largely due to the lack of social mobility - (for example, and the methodology may be somewhat dubious) we get headlines like "The Wealthy in Florence Today Are the Same Families as 600 Years Ago" and just think about it...

If you got rich, and had some kids, and some of them were complete pendejos or coños but you find yourself strangely attached to them despite your generational wealth, you might set them up with some bullshit business to ostensibly run as a hobby while consulting with an A-student of Accounting and Financial Planning to lock up ASSETS in a trust that can support them despite a COMPLETE ABSENCE OF BUSINESS ACCUMEN without them ever being able to sell off the very assets that generate the income that will support them and their stupid children and stupid grandchildren and finance their many divorces and unwillingness to pay child support for generations to come.

You'd do it. They have done it, for centuries.

The C-Curse Gets Worse: Nested Mediocrity and Subculture-Conformity

Something that I was slow on the uptake with, and hopefully it's not news to you, dear reader, was that our schooling system is I infer designed to test for conscientiousness and particularly industriousness, not intelligence. 

So I implore you not to get bogged down in C-student being limited to school grades I choose it because of the ambiguity of mediocrity. I'm going to invoke tertiary study now but I am not talking about grades and not just because RMIT continues to use A+ to DNS grades while Melbourne University uses an overwrought esoteric H1A, H2B grading system. 

I'm now talking about IQ, because by tertiary education specialization has begun in earnest. People do humanities, social sciences, hard sciences, technical disciplines and pure wank by University, and tend to further specialize by 2nd year after spending a year doing broad disciplinary subjects like Econ101, Acct101, Mktg101 etc.

IQ or "G" becomes more meaningful as a kind of predicter at how well a Law student might do understanding medicine vs a Medical student understanding law. It will likely be less predicted by their academic grades but by their relative IQs at that point.

I remember hearing roughly contemporary to my first time through University, some stat like the average Australian IQ was 107, but the average University students IQ was 127 or something, a whole standard deviation higher or there abouts (I am a C-student at probability). 

This I think in practice, is one of life's cruelties. Because tertiary education brings together a bunch of people who likely were king dick of their academic pool and puts them into a smaller pool where they are likely merely average or below.

Indeed, because our tertiary selection process favors superiority over excellence - superiority being relative and excellence being a threshold. It is very likely that for some people in some disciplines, they are merely mediocre in intelligence, but on campus, the dumbest people there.

Adding to the cruelty is what keeps me up at night, the Dunning-Kruger effect, which roughly states that if you are the dumbest person on campus, you are also less likely to notice you are the dumbest person on campus. 

Now it is time, finally, for this post to reject the null-hypothesis of Hitler's Law, a Law I coined which states:

"The longer one of tohm's blog-posts runs for, the probability he will invoke Lebron James approaches 1."

Lebron James is likely an NBA all-time great. I will concede that much. He is a fascinating case, because while he has tallied some impressive stat totals over his now 21 year professional career, including being by far the NBAs all time leader in turnovers with 5,459, he is among the all-time greats what I would call aggressively mediocre.

He is the athletic embodiment of Billy Conneley's joke:

"You know, I've been thinking about you a lot lately and you're a cunt. You've always been a cunt and in all likelihood you always will be a cunt. As a matter of fact, if they were giving a prize for World's Biggest Cunt, you'd probably come second."

"Second? Why wouldn't I come first?"

"Because you're a cunt." 

Truly, Lebron James is the Ford of NBA greats. His ability, in theory to play all 5 positions, means he isn't in any discussions like "who's the greatest point guard?" "who's the greatest shooter?" "who's the greatest center?" "who's the greatest rim-protector?" "who's the greatest shot-blocker?" etc.

He is theoretically in the GOAT debate, artificially restricted by a heavily invested NBA and NBA media, as though there is a contest between Lebron and Michael Jordan, an Orwellian position where 2+2=7 somehow. Yet Lebron has never been the best player in the NBA at any point of his long occassionally somewhat lustrous career. Early he was dominated by Kobe Bryant and Tim Duncan. His super team routed by Dirk Nowitzki's Also-ran all-stars of the previous generation, then eclipsed by the GSW dynasty of Steff Curry for his prime-late-prime years, before his deadweight stat-padding years on the Lakers saw Giannis then Jokic overtake him as greatest player in the world on their antithesis super-team no-help small market teams as Anthony Davis carried him on ice-skates uphill while killing coaches and smearing HOFer teammates Russel Westbrook, and the aforementioned AD,  soon to be Luca Doncic.

I think there's likely a real debate as to whether Lebron is better than Hakeem "the Dream" Olajuwon. Of which, Lebron probably loses, once you factor in the misfortune that Hakeem's career overlapped Michael Jordan's, and Hakeem is most likely the center I would compare to current best-in-the-world Nikola Jokic.

But this is the thing, by the time you are debating NBA players, let alone all-time-great NBA players, you are dealing with a level of nested mediocrity akin to the Guinness World Record holding most nesting of Babushka Dolls. 

The "White Mamba" Brian Scalabrine who averaged 3 points per game over his career famously said:

"I am closer to Lebron, than you are to me." ~ The White Mamba, producing a greater philosophical legacy than Lebron James in one sentence.

Which is to say, statistically speaking it is likely that the greatest athlete you ever personally know, was nowhere near good enough to go pro in any sport of sufficient popularity. 

(Again as a Balifornian, I have to make this qualifier, as I, the HS cross country captain of my small school was not in the top ten runners in my age group at the interschool competition. BHS by contrast had so many strong runners, that they did not even take the interschool comp seriously, playing on the playgrounds adjacent to the courses during the event and still beat me to a man. Their third strongest runner would go onto win an Olympic Gold Medal, because he realized he couldn't compete in long-distance running even at a state level and switched to walking. That school's prodigy, a freaky skeletal kid as far as I am aware, never made it to representing Australia nationally.) 

Another cruelty of life then, is that the field keeps getting spread as you pursue superiority such that all but the tiniest few, will forever be C-students, as Lebron James is, always has been, and ever will be, in the NBA hall of fame. He spends millions allegedly on his body every year, so that at age 40 he can stand blowing on his hands, or complaining to a ref as his team rushes back to play 4-on-5 defense. I cannot imagine what he spends per year to keep himself artificially in, and losing, the GOAT debate.

I believe this Nested mediocrity is called the Peter Principle and it's kind of a crueller form of natural selection, because at least with natural selection - you get put out of your misery. Whereas with nested mediocrity you live out your misery, and likely reproduce your children into that misery.

At which point, I need to then switch contexts from nested mediocrity to the adjacent concept that I'm sure works on the same fundamental mechanics - Subculture conformity.

So you work in hospitality or a call center or maybe you now hang out with other Ubereats/Door Dash/Deliveroo gig workers in front of a local McDonalds and shoot the shit as you await the opportunity to deliver takeaway to a C-student full time office worker, time poor and lazy because their only career strategy is based entirely on presenteeism. 

One of them, you find yourself respecting and admiring because of their unique self-expression. They don't dress like the rest of you, look at the same shit on their phones in downtime as the rest of you, they maybe even read an actual book. They are the most remarkable and unique person you know, and you feel somewhat privileged to have a friend like them, you consider it a perk of your shitty job.

Months pass and you both survive the natural attrition rates of your shitty jobs, and your unique colleague invites you somewhat sheepishly to their first-year art show. You go along, feeling self conscious wearing your seasonally-approved cut of jeans, cool conventional sneakers and clean graphic tee stepping onto an arts campus at night and walking into a show where...you discover everyone dresses, talks and acts like your friend.

No longer a unicorn literal they are just like all the other horses with the shift of context. Even the output of their distinct and unconventional mind is completely indistinguishable from the art exhibits of their peers.

Depending on where the art-scenes are in terms of the minimalist-maximalist cycle, they likely all look like this or this. Both examples taken from Exactitudes:

Started in 1994 in the streets of Rotterdam, this overarching and on-going project portrays individuals that share a set of defining visual characteristics that identifies them with specific social types. Be it Gabbers, Glamboths, Mohawks, Rockers or The Girls from Ipanema, Versluis and Uyttenbroek’s extremely acute eye allows them to discern specific dress codes, behaviours or attitudes that belong and characterise particular urban tribes or sub-cultures. Once they recognise an individual that fits the characteristics of a given group, they invite such person to be photographed at the studio with the only requirement of wearing the very exact same clothes s/he was wearing at the time they first encountered. ~ Taken from Exactitudes "About" page.

Exactitudes really use a methodology that isn't necessarily water-tight, to replicate the phenomena articulated in Monty Python's "Life of Brian"

Brian: "You're all individuals!"

Crowd (together): "Yes we are all individuals"

Individual: "I'm not..."

Crowd (together): "Shhhhh..."

While I don't have the direct experience myself, I imagine that this same manifestation of C-studentism, nested mediocrity, nested-normalization, is the constant bane of advertising firms. "We want to stand out so we came to you creatives. We want something like the gorilla-playing drums Cadbury ad." "Okay, well, you sell mostly goulash, how about we have two old hungarian ladies wrestling in goulash, weird, engaging, memorable." "Yeah wow! You guys really are creative, but we were thinking something more like a drummer in a gorilla suit playing the drums, like the Cadbury ad."

In which sense, subculture conformity mechanically is a movement away from the norm, but not too far from the norm. Hence the mediocrity drift of things like sleeve tattoos and neck tattoos. Whereas a unique individual wouldn't seek to move away from the norm, but from the population or sample.

It is also likely to be a manifestation of the Dunning-Kruger effect, in terms of self expression. If you want to be unique, it is very easy to not know how much there is to know about precedents of self expression. So people wind up not being unique, but conforming to a "unique" aesthetic, that changes constantly but has in the past two decades involved tramp stamps, fedoras, ugly sweaters, bicycle-frame glasses, bum-bags/fanny packs, 8 seasons of involuntarily writing material for Portlandia, griege attire, cultural appropriation from Japan, Korea and now Mexico.

It's hard to describe comprehensively, being fundamentally dynamic yet perennially tedious, in my own intellectual shorthand, I call it the "adolescent impulse" which is to say, adolescence was, for much of the 20th century post invention of the transistor radio, a period in which children migrated away from identifying with their family to awkwardly figuring out an individual identity. It likely manifested as going from adult-oriented to peer-oriented, hence kids start doing things like dressing, ostensibly, by their parents to dressing themselves.

If however they succeed at adolescence, they become adults, and here we get a perpetual push-pull, because the next class of adolescents need to differentiate themselves from adults like their parents and adults like you. Hence, the migration away from the norm becomes the new norm. 

The cachet of going to Japan loses its cachet and hence you have to find somewhere else to go to be interesting by looking to your peers, so you switch from Osaka to Oaxaca. Until that inevitably collapses.

Because the sad fact is, there will always be more people who want to be interesting, than are interesting. Most people, indeed the vast majority of people seem to be fundamentally unqualified to be interesting. Hell I don't know if I have the qualifications to be interesting, and the fact that you have read this far most likely means a person who is not very interesting is reading the writing of someone who is not very interesting.

Monkey-see-Monkey-do

This is my best guess at the fundamental principle underlying C-ciety. Blessedly but annoyingly, I've already written it up. But you don't have to go read a whole other blog post on my badly outdated html script. I'll do a brief recap.

It's basically this: I think about how easy it is for me a human of most likely average intelligence to trap a dog with intelligence comparable to a 3-6 year old child, in an inescapable situation. It's not just that unlike the velociraptor most dogs can't operate a door knob, it is the ease with which I can repeatadly trick a dog into entering the same inescapable room until I see fit to let them in or out.

Granted, Usma, my mexican terrier could easily get me up off my feet to slide open the metal mesh door onto our courtyard at will with the deployment of a simple scratch, often times I suspect, just to enjoy her power over me, to get me up and out of my chair, but hopefully you get my point.

Why then, don't the smartest people just obliterate people everyone not quite as smart and down, out of the gene pool. Why isn't the flynn effect more pronounced?

Likely there's multiple explanations, the ones at the limits of my limited imagination being - 

• the smartest people often foil eachother, rather than cooperate. cancelling out their mutual advantage.
• the smartest people are randomly distributed more-or-less throughout the population, whereas opportunity (power and influence) is hoarded by the wealthy. (we don't live in a meritocricy)
• survival of the kindest supersedes in social mammals, the selective benefits of intelligence, such that most intelligent people don't have any drive to destroy competitors for resources.
• The world is just too complicated for IQ or g to be a sustainable competitive advantage anyway because it only accounts for 20% of outcome.

But one I suspect is the big-one is "monkey-see-monkey-do" which is to say, when anyone figures anything out, most of the time, the solution is easily duplicated.

C-students everywhere, in every context just copy what the smart people are doing, so the half-life of advantage is incredibly small. Granted this can backfire:

And in terms of nested mediocrity, I myself mostly pass off other's opinions as my own, I just go further than the smartest person I know, to like books and public intellectuals like Chomsky and Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Kobe Bryant and Bill Russell.

In many ways, that's what learning is, hence most high school Physics graduates know more about physics than Isaac Newton did.

C-World In Practice

In terms of interesting opinions I've been passing off as my own, much of this post is inspired by Daniel Markovits interview with the Institute of Art and Ideas, I haven't even read his book.

This is where I'm taking monkey-see-monkey-do and applying the very useful dichotomy of "excellence" vs. "superiority" he elaborates on in the interview.

We live in a world based on superiority. This is in many ways the allegory of the bear, which may be an actual biblical allegory but I'm referring to the guy who hearing the bear's roar, puts his running shoes on and his companion asks him "you think you can outrun a bear?" and the guy says "I don't have to outrun a bear, I just have to outrun you."

Superiority is relative, and as such it means you and I for example, cannot both be superior. Excellence is a threshold, it is absolute, furthermore it is dependent on producing a social good. One cannot be excellent at something that is bad.

What has me thinking about C-students lately, is business advice. See, I'm still processing the trauma of changing from casual employment to full-time. You might think that this revolves around having to get out of bed in the AM and commute during rush hour. My metabolic cycles adjusted relatively quickly.

No the skunked-trauma I am referring to, is that of going from underemployment to overemployment, both align only in the sense that one struggles to keep up good work. But when you are casual, you work hard, where in full time, often you have to work hard to get any work done at all, or work hard at finding enough work to do. So far I am succeeding, and a big part of the motivation is that my memory is fresh of what hard work feels like.

But when you take a lunch break knowing nobody is watching a clock to chase you down if you go more than two minutes over the collectively bargained break time allowance, you can feel kind of sad. A kind of ongoing survivors guilt that you have seen behind the curtain and know that a bunch of remarkably unproductive C-students (not singling out anyone in particular, and not necessarily excluding myself) collectively and systematically apply pressure to another group of C-students to be unreasonably productive, until they burn out, to be replaced.

This though, is just one aspect, the other prominent aspect of life behind the curtain that somewhat evokes trauma, is the almost random way in which one student can be receiving quite a large distribution of resources whereas others are stuck on the bread line. A lot of this, if not most of this, is the endurance of feudalism, why, while I suspect I'd find a bunch of problems with methodology, I would never be surprised to find generational wealth can persist for 600 years,

Most of the rags-to-riches-to-rags stories we might hear as we progress through life, are likely largely noise. Some social mobility is luck, some is crime, but most is economic growth. Unsustainable economic growth. 

As such, most of our economy is C-students transacting with other C-students, and this is WAY unappreciated. I need to write about overemployment, that I am thus far successfully avoiding, by mostly sheer luck, but yes, I need to for my own sanity.

The thing is, in practice, holding down a job is finding a context in which you are a B-student, and then creating value for C-students. I suspect this will be the defining trait of consulting firms that sell Lean Manufacturing, 6 Thinking Hats, Matrix management, The Paperless Office, E-commerce, Internet Advertising, Online recruitment ... Agile management, AR, VR, the Metaverse, Blockchain and now "AI" will boil down to. In the kingdom of the blind - the one eyed man is king etc.

I need to stress however, the pertinance of C-students, versus average IQ. IQ is context independent (largely it still has linguistic vs geometric components or whatever) A C-grade is context dependent. Such that, industries that tend to attract broad-context A students like Law and Medicine, will still be populated largely by C students when you come to the ever evolving consultancy products for sale - from Snake Oil panaceas to AI.

AI is interesting, because it's big theoretical selling point is productivity. Something easy to sell to C-students it appears. Why? because while at a C grade, what is known and unknown is at max ambiguity, reliably C-businesspeople in particular, are in a form of upbeat denial as to how great a problem overemployment already is.

I may as well commit here, that I think AI is a bubble. It tickles all my marketing senses as being a load of hot air. I would wager, if I knew how and had sufficient assets to go short, that the hype cycle will collapse not into reality but oblivion.

The whole thing seems like a super expensive way to reinvent Clippy. So you know unambiguously where I tentatively stand.

My suspicion is that most of the sales, such as they are, are as Ed Zitrow points out, made by people who fill their days writing and reading emails, and now there's a thing that can somewhat accurately summarize emails. 

The thing is, that those emails most likely function as a solution to the wicked problem of OVEREMPLOYMENT. Which is to say, exactly what was predicted by Keynes in his essay "On the Economic Opportunities of Our Grandchildren" minus the opportunities being realized, and the actual outcome as described by David Graeber in his essay "On Bullshit Jobs" which build's on Keynes' essay.

Namely, anyone in say Australia, presently holding down a full-time job, likely has a very expensive housing arrangement eating up most of their disposable income. They have big financial obligations that will eventually force them to lose their generational wealth, as housing and schooling become ever more expensive and late-in-life care will be financed by what wealth they do manage to accumulate.

Furthermore, the increase in asset prices like housing has been driven in Australia by increased private sector debt, not economic growth despite economies world-wide becoming enormously more productive, because that hasn't translated into real-wage growth.

Those opinions, based in sanguine fact, are taken from Gary Stevenson and Yanis Varoufakis. As such, every full time employee has a really strong incentive to merely survive, by never letting on that they are overemployed and as a result tremendously unproductive. 

Most offices, long before surveillance software, adapted means by which to use "activity" as a proxy for "productivity" you write emails so that when the boss walks passed, it looks like you are doing something, you have meetings because they kill time and people assume you are meeting to discuss something of import and consequence. This opinion I take from Cal Newport.

So what I'm describing as the wicked problem endemic to C-world or C-ciety, is that wages are linked to hours, not value (especially not value in terms of social goods) vestigia from the industrial revolution. Full time employees cannot drop their hours, without dropping their wages, something they literally cannot do because they have financial obligations based on their full-time wage. 

The real shit-kicker though, is that C-ciety spend so much time and effort - fucking eachother up. It's hard to be productive as a B-A-student, because C-students send you emails and schedule meetings. C-students are also trying to escape their terrible overemployment situation by aspiring to higher wages, and most of them resort to competing for those higher wages by increasing their activity over even more hours. Something that can seem justified because all their activity makes it so hard to get work done.

Then you wind up with all these C-managers, not to be confused with C-suite as in the "Chief something Officer" roles. I mean middle-managers, those too useful to fire, too useless to trust with real responsibility.

These are professional disruptors that make overemployment work. The people who make it almost impossible in many organizations to get any work done during 9-5. I am taking this opinion from a TED talk I can't be bothered to track down, but I believe it is backed up by some data, even if it is survey data.

Japan has famously, excelled since the 1980s at voluntary overtime. They also famously, have one of the world's least productive workforces, with going on 3+ decades of stagnation. Virtually untouchable stock index by value investors.

Peter Drucker admired much about Japanese business practices, but he ultimately could not recommend them, and though he did not put it in these terms, it's more-or-less because Japan puts all the C-students onto busy work, and render them wholly irrelevant. Even in the heydays of the Economic Miracle and the Bubble Years.

So why the fuck would you try to build autonomous software to increase the productivity of a mostly overemployed workforce? The problem isn't productivity, its pricing and has been for a long time.

Conclusion

The C-World is the antithesis of the conspiracy theory. It basically bets against intelligent design, it may well be the foundation of Hanlon's razor. It is the very distressing and uncomfortable idea that people like Australians can be incredibly wealthy, with some of the largest houses on earth and best quality of life, and largely have no idea what they are doing. 

It is the uncomfortable reality, that just because somebody pulls up to your office in a BMW, tailored suit, hair transplants and enamelled teeth, they may be completely insolvent and about to drag you with them into a financial black hole.

It is the disturbing notion that the internet set up an ant-mill particularly apt if you like me, stole opinions from Julia Galef, but stupidly, forget to pass them off as your own, where Soldiers incurously defend their territory, including intellectual ones, and now the blind simply follow the blind, because all the C-student monkeys use google to find C-student monkeys to teach them what they already think they know.

Like maybe you, who stumbled across my C-student worldview because you searched for Julia Galef, James Maynard Keynes, Gary Stevenson, Yanis Varoufakis, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Noam Chomsky, Billy Connelly or "cunts".