And I don’t just mean regular bad. I mean abysmal. A joke. You should be so regrettably awful that friends and tutors of your trade swear off any hope of you getting past square one. So bad that you never do get past square one.
Now, don’t expect your friends to keep doing this thing with you. Don’t expect to watch yourself improve and feel the resulting pride. Just embrace being awful, and don’t quit (spoiler alert: this is not a lecture about perseverance, it’s about being terrible).
Just be bad at something for the sake of being bad. It’s not always easy to be bad. If you do something enough, you’re liable to get better at it, and that’s at odds with the whole point.
You’ve just got to stay terrible.
Early on you will feel shame. Your friends will not join you; bystanders will gasp. Babies will cry, dogs will bark, and cats will howl at your efforts. Parents will shield the eyes of their children as you flail wildly away. They will judge you and feel pity, but pay them no mind. You know that this is not some process, but the plan.
To be clear, this is not an argument for how instructive the learning process itself can be, or how being a beginner at something teaches humility that makes you a better person, or that being bad at something is somehow a kind of necessary evil that rests somewhere along they way to mastery. Those are all valid points, but this is more simple.
Eventually, if you’re bad enough for long enough, you might just stop feeling ashamed. You might stop noticing the gawking and gasping bystanders. If you’re bad enough for long enough, eventually, you’ll get pretty good at being awful.
The more time that you spend hacking it up, the more comfortable it will become. If you stick it out for long enough, your enjoyment the things you do will dissociate from your proficiency at them. And then pretty soon you’ll just enjoy having a day out.
If you can enjoy being bad, you’ll never be afraid to try something ever again. And who knows? Maybe you’ll be good at that.
Here we are, in our offices and in front of our desks, on the first work day after the first Presidential debate of the 2016 election. Ho man. If you’re anything like pretty much anyone else on earth, you’re probably spending at least a third of your time on Facebook, watching the pinging back and forth between your “Bernie or Bust” college roommate and your redneck uncle who’s stockpiling weapons somewhere in the Idaho panhandle.
Yessirree, it’s going to be a wild few months on the ‘ol social media as the Great American Experiment grinds through the electoral process and millions of armchair analysts freshen their coffee, turn on CAPS LOCK, and fire away into the cloud.
It can get confusing out there, in your Facebook newsfeed. There’s yelling. There are hyperlinks to plain HTML websites with black backgrounds as citations. People keep telling you you hate the troops and you’re going to hell and all you really want is an affordable way to go to college. What gives?
“First of all, you’re fucking crazy.” – Plato
At work in this country is our communal failure to properly identify and avoid logical fallacies in the pursuit of our civic process. And so to help streamline things a little bit, I’ve picked out a few that you should keep an eye out for.
The Logical Fallacies of Facebook:
a user’s guide to dealing with your redneck uncle and whackjob aunt so you can all still enjoy Thanksgiving together in a few months
The False Equivalency – falsum ex condigno – This is a big one. Maybe the main one. It stems from establishing an incorrect premise on which an argument is built. Think about it this way: if you were baking a cake, and you ran out of ingredients, but then you remembered hearing in a presidential debate that vegetable oil and motor oil are interchangeable, your cake would make a lot of people sick. This kind of confusion happens a lot.
Because that’s the thing about science. It’s tricky. Which is why we have scientists who do it for us. And just to make sure those scientists don’t get all fast and loose, we have other scientists check their work through a process called peer review. So when it gets through that, you can be pretty sure it’s legit.
We rely on scientists to do our science for the same reason that we elect politicians, and go to doctors, and have people with tattoos make our coffee. It’s so that we don’t have to figure out how to do it ourselves. Multi-level Bayesian analysis and crafting policy and negotiating arms deals with Iran is confusing. We hire people to do that for us so that we can follow our true calling: cranking beers and yelling at each other on the internet.
The Appeal to Nature – appellare ad naturam – And while we’re talking about science, the notion that something is “natural” is not a valid argument for why it is right. Vaccinate your damn kids.
The Anecdotal Fallacy – anecdotal fallacia – I had a roommate once tell me that he never wears a seat belt because his father has been in three rollover collisions without a seat belt and every time he was thrown to safety. You can file this in the same place as the story that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheered as the towers came down: it is, at best, irrelevant, and pretty much guaranteed to be made up bullshit anyway.
The Bandwagon Approach – argumentum ad populum – “A lot of people are saying [insert claim here].” This one should be obvious. Cite your damn sources. Real ones. Not that fifth-page-Google-results tripe that just links to Alex Jones blogs if anything at all.
The Irrelevant Conclusion – ignorantio elenchi – This is another big one, and you see it a lot in debates, both televised and unfolding on the wall of an unsuspecting gradeschool classmate that you haven’t seen or spoken to in nearly two decades. It’s sort of like saying “I have a pet duck, therefore your car is purple.”
Keep a close eye out for Straw Man (changing or oversimplifying an opponent’s argument so that it’s easier to refute) and Red Herring (changing the subject because your point doesn’t actually make any sense and you don’t want to talk about it anymore) arguments, and remember that neither of them are characters on Game of Thrones.
Appeal to Improper Authority – argumentum ad verecundium – “CALL SEAN HANNITY! ASK HIM!”
Remember, the employment if these fallacies is not crafty debate technique. It just makes you look ignorant and uninformed. So study up, cite your sources, and don’t be afraid to change an opinion when faced with compelling evidence that refutes it!
But it’s not here yet, and it won’t be here for a while. It’ll be dark like 20 hours a day soon, and the snow won’t fly for a little while longer, and the new season of Game of Thrones apparently doesn’t air until like July. Pretty much we’re doomed.
Yes. A paper one. With pages. None of those Kindle things. Isn’t that a Kardashian, anyway?
And so to get you started, here’s a few fall book recommendations that should get you through ’til the snow flies.
Fall book recommendations.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre – B. Traven – Good ‘ol dang ‘ol adventure story with just enough socialist indignation to really resonate with a generation of millennials. A few down-and-out strangers in the 1920s skip town to search for a lost and cursed Aztec gold mine. Warning – there is a morale to this story.
The Immortal Irishman – Timothy Egan – Irish Republican indignation? Old timey frontier antics? Mysterious deaths of famous people? He had me at “indignation.” The story of an Irish revolutionary and Montana’s first Governor, this one is a biography that reads more like fiction.
Trinity – Leon Uris – If The Immortal Irishman left your indignation cup just half full, then slip on some sheepwool slippers, pour yourself a Jameson (bring the bottle, this book is long), and crack into Trinity. If Jack London wrote the Bible and set it in 19th century Dublin, you might get something like this.
The Monkey Wrench Gang – Edward Abbey – This book opens with two characters cutting down billboards with a chainsaw, and the hijinx just keep going from there. If you’re feeling any indignation about Bernie not getting a fair shake, or the North Dakota Access Pipeline, or you’re just generally angry at The Man, here’s a great place to find some inspiration. Jeep week is right around the corner!
Alpine Ski Tours of the Canadian Rockies – Chic Scott – Because ski season is almost here, after all, and we can’t just be angry all the time.
Hot Water – PG Wodehouse – Light-hearted, hilarious. Best to read it with an English accent.
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole – Here’s one that you might not quite know what to make of the whole time you’re in it, and then one day you realize it’s your favorite book. An homage to self-righteous, over-educated under-achievers everywhere.
Don Quixote – Miguel Cervantes – The first novel. No, really. It’s more than 400 years old, but it is absolutely modern in its concerns and its relevancy. You really owe it to yourself to know more about Don Quixote than that he jousted with windmills. Just make sure you get a good translation.
The Italian Grill – Mario Batali – It’s dark out. It’s cold. It’s actually a great time to fire up the grill. Batali’s recipes here take a long time (frequently days), so it’s a great thing to kind of work on a little bit during the week and then reap the rewards on the weekend. Summer cookouts are fine, but there’s nothing better than grilling under a crisp winter night. Batali himself has had some little ethical issues (like widespread, systematic wage theft in his restaurants), so feel free to get this one at the library or find a pirated copy online.
Under the Wide and Starry Sky – Nancy Horan – Buy this book. Buy one for yourself. Then buy one for your girlfriend/boyfriend/regular friends. Buy one for each roommate. Then for each member of your family all the way through third cousins. Hardcover is preferred. It’s the life and history of the man who brought us Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Treasure Island and Kidnapped, packaged as a riveting novel. Probably you should buy a spare.
Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace – You will laugh. You will cry. Carrying this book around is the perfect complement to your Warby Parker glasses and Gitanes cigarettes. The magnum opus of a deeply troubled, profoundly insightful man, you’ll get out of this one what you put into it. You will not get through this a few pages at a time before bed; I recommend leaving the country for someplace without electricity for a month and just, like, living between the pages, man.
The Nix – Nathan Hill – Is it disrespectful to call The Nix diet Infinite Jest? I don’t know. I do know that it’s got a similar style, similar feel, and also that it’s way, way more user friendly. You still get the fragmented narrative, the semi-cynical insights to the world around us, but you can probably read this one at home.
Don’t forget to support your local bookseller, and holler if there’s anything I’m missing.
Dear Editor of My Local Newspaper [readership: affluent, white],
I’m writing now to say that I saw something the other day, and I didn’t like it. You see, when I moved here seven years ago [from Portland, or San Diego or something], I liked the way things were. They suited me. That was back when this place was like it used to be, before, when things were new and exciting for me personally. It was back when many of my local experiences conformed to and validated my worldview. Back when it was great. Not like now. This place is terrible now. Just look at that thing I saw the other day!
You see, after I moved here, other people [younger/ethnic, possibly both] moved here too. Where do they get off, anyway!? When I first got here this was my own personal playground. I had the whole place to myself to pursue my favorite esoteric hobby, but now every time I go outside other people are outside too. Do you believe that? All those other people should do what I did, and find their own place to go. We need to stop all these people from moving here now that I’ve finally built my dream home [in the urban-forest interface].
Really, it comes to to respect. Kids these days just don’t get it. It used to be that we stood for something. Like free love, and Jerry Garcia, and spitting on soldiers returning from war. Now these kids just want free jobs that they don’t even want to work for! Do you believe that? All this whining is just getting old. If they really wanted jobs, they’d make them for themselves. Like I did. But I digress.
The main issue at hand here is that many of the things I occasionally see make me uncomfortable, and I hate being uncomfortable.
This is why I’m advocating for this sweeping policy change. Things are changing and I don’t like it. People are moving here, and their interests are different from mine. It hurts my feelings, and my feelings are the most important thing to me. They should be equally important to you. I base most of my decisions on my feelings, and I feel like the city council should too. Instead they’ll probably just raise taxes again, so that poor people can move here and live on my hard work. Where does it stop!?!
If we don’t act now, people might keep moving here even though I already like it the way it is. Or rather, the way it was.
Planning for the future is a funny thing. We’ve all got ideas for what we’d like to do. Maybe you’ve got a job you want (or want to quit). Or a degree you’d like to finish. Or a book you’d like to write. Me? I’d like to spend a month in Ireland, living in a van and surfing. The food there is terrific. The people are great. The surfing is world class. I heard they have beer.
It’s something I’d like to do someday, which means that it will never happen.
See, thinking too much about the future is a waste of time, for the sole reason that it’s the future. By definition, it never arrives — by the time the future gets here, it’s the present.
This all seems very circuitous and semantic, except that it’s at the center of why we never seem to get anything done, or achieve those faraway goals. It’s like Steinbeck said about socialism in America, that it never caught on because “we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.” We tend to think of the future as already clinched, or that it will somehow be different than today. But in order to plan for the future, first we need to plan for the present.
See, the trip to Ireland sounds great. I’ve got a very clear, very romantic vision of what that month would look like. On the other hand, I have no plane ticket. I have no chunk of time blocked off, no money set aside, and no real idea of an itinerary. Also I don’t know how to surf. The trip is an idea, which so long as it exists safely in an intangible future, may remain nebulously construed and perfect.
It will never, however, happen.
It will never happen as long as it exists in the future (because like we said before, the future, categorically, never arrives). In order for me to head to Ireland to live the surf bum dream, it needs to happen today. Right now. And if I don’t fly out today, then I need to move some element of the trip to today. And another element to tomorrow. The trip itself needs to take place in the present. Maybe that’s buying a plane ticket. Maybe it’s setting aside a few bucks. Maybe is figuring out how to surf. But until something happens today, well, it hasn’t happened yet.
I know that this sounds a bit like navel gazing. Of course big trips and life changes require planning, and that planning can take weeks, months, years. Some might argue that planning an expedition is the best part. I would argue that planning the trip is as much a part of it as boarding a plane or taking the first paddle stroke. In addition to being rewarding (and necessary), it moves the future into the present. This makes whatever “it” is real and no longer hypothetical.
This is bigger than flying to Europe to be homeless.
It’s easy to dream about quitting a job you hate, or getting out of a bad relationship, or writing that novel you’ve got banging around in your head. But by thinking about the future as something that has yet to arrive we’re able to put off making changes indefinitely. The fact is that the future is here, right now. What are you doing to make it better?
