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When I try to describe how I feel here, all that comes out is clichés — there’s a certain energy here, it’s a buzzing pot of humanity, it’s so diverse, so rich with potential experiences, too vast to comprehend, a city with ten million stories, or any other inadequate language you might find in the intro section of a Lonely Planet.

I heart NY, I really do. So many have said so, and with words as my medium there’s little I can add that isn’t already a part of your consciousness, whether you’ve been here or not. I hope that photographs, though, might begin to relate something beyond the cloud of familiar superlatives that surround anyone’s account of this amazing place.

Take your time. Enjoy.

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Photos by David Cain

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NEW YORK, NY — Last Wednesday, thousands of students of all levels of education woke up to find their sole source of knowledge gone.

Visitors arriving at Wikipedia were greeted by a black screen, with a small number of words on it. The words, if read, explained that Wikipedia had temporarily shut its doors to protest a congressional bill that could shut it down permanently.

Having left their assignments until two days before their Friday morning due dates, the nation’s students had no time to read the forty or so explanatory words and instead made heartfelt appeals to Twitter, demanding it inform them of why they could not access Wikipedia.

Suddenly finding that they had no access to knowledge whatsoever, mass confusion descended on the student population, and the finger pointing began. Everyone from Julian Assange to the Soap industry was indicted.

After much investigative texting and all-caps ranting, Wikipedia emerged as the prime suspect in Wikipedia’s disappearance.

“I think Wikipedia planned this shit,” says class president hopeful Daniel Ornelas, having outdone his fellow students by skimming the three explanatory sentences on Wikipedia’s blackout page, or perhaps even clicking the “Learn more” link.

Once the perpetrator was identified, the outrage was emphatic and palpable as the students recognized the abject injustice in Wikipedia’s temporary refusal to continue to provide invaluable information for free:

By diligently studying volumes of text-message sized broadcasts, the more astute students learned that Wikipedia’s disappearance was due to a conflict between political forces and some manner of activism — but for the throngs of desperate classgoers, a day’s worth of Wikipedia access proved to be an unthinkable price to pay for any sort of protest, regardless of what it hoped to achieve. Assignments could be set back 24 hours or more, grades on the coming test could suffer dramatically.

Yet most students, too distressed by their impending assignments, gave up trying to decipher the complex motives behind Wikipedia’s inaccessible condition, and had no alternative but to continue shouting their grief into the surviving social networks.

Enraged at Wikipedia for not being there that day, students harbored no patience for the day’s other development — rumors about a possible connection between the catastrophic effect of Wikipedia’s temporary absence, and the reason it decided to make itself temporarily absent. Crucial schoolwork had to be done, and Wikipedia was not upholding its end of the unspoken agreement it has had with students since 2007.

Though it seemed like it might last forever, the horrific day eventually came to a satisfying close. Service was restored at midnight eastern time, and a nation of beleaguered youths were finally able to resume their educations.

As relieved students everywhere pushed aside their respective stacks of almost-used of library books and got to work, a Palo Alto senior addressed Wikipedia with a forgiving tweet, summarizing his generation’s sentiment almost perfectly: “As long as you never let this happen again, I don’t even wanna know why you’re being such a bitch today.”

****

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Photo by theexhibitionist

New Year’s Eve, for the first time, I had an alarming moment when I realized spaceships really were watching me through the ceiling. They knew where I was in the house. I was troubled by it and said so to my friend, but by midnight I forgot, and felt much better.

Rewind a week or two. I was taking adorable pictures of my toddler nephew typing on his grandmother’s iPad, when I had one of those bewildering, revelatory moments.

I realized I was photographing a member of the first generation that will be able to revisit its entire life in sparkling, high resolution. Between me, his parents and his grandmother, there are easily more photos of him than there have been days in his life.

His brother is six months now. In 2081, when they’re both old men, they’ll be able to access their childhood in extraordinary detail. They’ll see their first Christmases, their first bike rides, their graduations and wedding days all in high resolution images and HD video, and it might seem strange to them that previous generations did not have much access at all to their pasts, aside from memories and a few grainy photographs.

Contrast that with my father, (1947-2008) of whom I’ve only seen one or two pictures of as a child. In those pictures he’s someone I don’t know. He has a smooth sepia face that could belong to just about anyone except my dad. He wore a moustache from the day I was born to the day he died and I couldn’t recognize my father in any other face.

The kids born after about 2007 constitute the first generation that’s younger than Facebook. Today, it’s fairly normal for human beings make their first appearance on the internet when they are less than a week old. Think of how many newborn photos you’ve seen posted by your Facebook friends this last year.

The generation growing up now will be the first one for whom the internet has always been around. For them there will have always been a virtual world of data that follows and documents everyone and everything they know about. Every person they know has an online profile, every object they own or place they visit has a wikipedia article.

They will take for granted that everyone they know has information about them — photos, dates, quotes and other data — floating around in the ether, accessible from anywhere, and virtually indestructible. 

I’m still getting used to the idea. I have an app on my phone that lets you take a photograph of something, and it will tell you what it knows about it if it recognizes it. It works about 80% of the time. I can take a picture of a book and it will return the Amazon page for it or the Wikipedia article for it. I can photograph a business card and it will show me everything Google can find on that person. It can recognize public landmarks, art, photographs, and publications. It can recognize famous people in photos, by scouring Google Images for similar photos. It takes about ten seconds and it’s free.

It’s still fairly experimental, but it’s easy to imagine where this technology will be five or ten years. I’d bet any money that before today’s todders graduate high school, they’ll be able to point their phone at a person walking down the street and find out at least their name and a host of linked information, most of the time. Probably well before that.

This speculative article was big on StumbleUpon four years ago, and at the time it seemed so far away. Now it doesn’t.

When I was a teenager, all internet was dialup. You had to turn it on and off, and it occupied your phone line. Search engines were atrocious, virtually unusable. You couldn’t even find out the score to the Giants/Packers game last night. It probably wasn’t even on the internet at all, and the search engines of the day only had the vaguest ideas what you were on about.

You had to take what you could get, which was never quite what you were after. When you were done poking around at whatever decent websites you could find, you turned it off and went back to real life. Today, online and offline no longer have a clear boundary, and this coming generation won’t really understand that there ever was one.

Anyone born into a high-tech society at this point in the game will be totally, irreversibly accustomed to information served up on command, like my generation was born without it occuring to them that there was a time before TV.

When they’re teenagers they’ll be able to ask their phones “Did Mom smoke weed in college?” and instantly have pictures and third party accounts, if the data is out there somewhere. And there will be lots of data out there somewhere.

I was on Facebook before I ever decided to be on Facebook. Four or five years ago, I was at a pub with some acquaintances and they started talking about Facebook. Being a staunch holdout, I tuned out and waited for a new topic, because I had nothing to do with Facebook and wasn’t interested in it.

Then while I was spacing out, one of the girls poked me in the ribs. “There’s lots of pictures of you on Facebook, you know.”

Oh?

I did eventually cave, as many of you know, and now there’s more about me online than you could possibly want to know.

There’s really no going back now. Once something’s online, there’s no way to get it off. That’s a 21st century maxim that warrants some pondering:

Once you put it online, it belongs to everyone, forever. Thank you.

The three slippery slopes

I think we sometimes underestimate how much of us is out there, and how easy it is to find.

Whenever someone contacts me for an interview or some other request, if I don’t know who they are I Google them. I search them on Facebook, which almost always yields a picture of them even if they have an unusually tight set of privacy restrictions. If they have any online presence, I can find pages of what they’ve written or said, what online personalities they associate with, and what they’re into.

None of this is done with any sinister intention, I only do it because it’s easy and helps me understand a bit about who I’m dealing with.

If I wanted to get really nosy, I could find out what name they use to comment on blogs, and thereby find out their political positions, what makes them angry, major life events they’ve mentioned, what causes they support, who they vote for, what they believe their personal weaknesses are, names of many of their friends, and of course their age, place of birth, marital status, probably the names of their children, and if they’re especially careless or trusting, their home address.

I could do this all from a park bench, legally, with no exclusive tools or hacker knowledge — all just by examining what they’ve volunteered at one point or another. The only things stopping me are that I have better things to do, and that I’m not a creepy stalker. But not everyone is the same in those two respects.

If that’s not creepy enough, know that we’re only getting more exposed to the online snoop as technology improves and we use it more. Three other information-age realities promise to make us even more accessible to prying minds:

1) Putting data about ourselves into the public sphere is only going to get easier, faster, and less conscious

2) Expectations about how much can and should be found out on the internet are only going to increase

3) Finding any given bit of information is only going to get easier

We’re accelerating toward a society where it’s normal for our lives to be largely public. People who don’t want bits of their history and personality floating in the ether have to go to increasingly greater efforts to stay offline, simply because the internet is becoming more integrated into how we do everything. We use it more, we feed it more personal information, and we expect more information from it, and we think about it less. I only know a few remaining Facebook holdouts. They’re an endangered species.

Spaceships are watching me through the ceiling

I was part of the also-endangered “dumb phone” demographic until New Year’s Eve. While I was testing out the features of my new Android, there were a few moments in which I experienced that peculiar emotion that’s equal parts fascination and horror.

Among other features that are neat enough to be scary, I discovered that I can zoom in on Google Maps to the house I am in, until the house is nothing but a fuzzy brown shape, and watch a tiny blue triangle move back and forth inside that fuzzy shape, as I walk between the dining room and the kitchen.

In a surreal, horrific moment, I realize am the blue triangle, and unmanned spaceships are tracking my every move through the ceiling. Now, I know I can turn off the GPS capability at any time. But while it was on, I was sharing some frighteningly intimate information about myself, and I don’t really know with whom. As time goes on, the shape is only going to get less fuzzy.

We send data out to faceless databases and networks all the time without thinking about it, and anything that is broadcast can potentially be recorded. There are privacy policies and other corporate promises that claim to protect you, but really we’re just constantly throwing information into a giant black box that might as well be labeled, “Stuff I told the internet.”

Amazon knows that you start your Christmas shopping late, that you read left-wing authors, and of course it knows your credit card information and your street address. Google knows you want to learn more about auto-erotic asphyxiation, that you keep replaying My Heart Will Go On on YouTube, and that you probably have irritable bowel syndrome. It’s all circumstantial evidence about who you are, it might not be traceable to your legal name, but it’s all out there and someone’s definitely hanging onto it.

Let’s assume that we can totally trust those big companies with all that. Honestly, at this stage of the game, I do. I think. And it seems like we’re mostly protected from inadvertently becoming too public because what we broadcast is ultimately voluntary.

After all, we choose what we type and what we post. You might reason that you can curate your online self quite carefully, if you can just stay aware of what you’re sharing, and remember the world is listening.

But “voluntary” might be too simplistic a concept here. It’s not always so easy or simple to say no.

For example, I’m sure you’re aware by now that Mark Zuckerberg is imposing his vision on the Facebook world by converting every profile to a Timeline — an automated chronology of all the bits of your life you’ve put online, whether you realized you were doing it or not.

If you don’t want your life so readily chronicled for others, then no problem, right? Because it’s ultimately voluntary.

You just have to delete your Facebook.

Are you going to do that? A few will, and meanwhile the vast majority of us will continue to use it because it’s a big part of life, it has a lot of advantages, and we’re accustomed to them. If it means increased publicness, then I guess we’re game for that.

It’s getting a bit creepy when Facebook remembers more about my life than I do. It can tell me (or any of the other 500 people on my account) what day I became friends with so-and-so, or what was on my mind at 1:31pm April 11th, 2009, even if I have no clue. It seems to know where my photos were taken, even though I’m pretty sure I never told it.

Yet I can’t quite imagine opting out.

Why not? Because there are definitely parts of it I like. I can interact with the like-minded, learn from them, and watch their lives unfold from a polite distance.

So we let ourselves become a little more public, and it keeps us honest and keeps us connected.

But truthfully we have no idea what this tradeoff really amounts to — what liabilities we’re creating by making our details so accessible. If it seems like a fair price to pay, maybe it’s because we haven’t paid it yet.

***

How do you feel about your life becoming more public? Do you think it’s a healthy trend in general? Do you take steps to keep your information offline?

Wonderful photo by Gato-Gato-Gato

Stars, if you leave them for long enough, will eventually come up with the Mona Lisa.

And not in a hypothetical way, like those non-existent, proverbial monkeys who are always typing up MacBeth by accident.

What I’m talking about has already happened.

We trick ourselves into believing it doesn’t work like that, but it’s true. Star systems can and do eventually produce great works of art, and we’ve observed this. The great Alan Watts makes this interesting property of the universe clear using a simple analogy.

In his example, an apple tree produces apples every summer. As a botanist might say, at a certain time of year the tree fruits. An apple tree, more specifically, apples.

Imagine that aliens cruised by earth a few billion years ago. They checked for signs of intelligence, found only rocks and oceans, and they left.

Then they came back last week sometime, and found that there was a lot more going on. There were people, and a lot of other unfamiliar stuff that doesn’t look like rocks. Earlier they had seen that it was just a bunch of rocks. But in the mean time, the rocks peopled.

You leave rocks for a few billion years and they just might people. Evidently. As Watts puts it, we grow out of this world in exactly the same way as apples grow out of that tree.

But we’re usually a little prudish about saying it that way. We gloss over the fact that a dead earth became a living one, because that would imply that somehow intelligence does indeed arise from rocks, and something about that offends our normal way of thinking. We like to compartmentalize nature’s phenomena as if they work cleanly, like billiard balls – they can strike each other in the most complex ways, yet always be ultimately separate.

At worst, we apply a supernatural explanation to the whole show, because otherwise we’d have to recognize intelligence as a natural extension of the things that happen on a barren, unattended planet. For some reason we often insist nature couldn’t be that interesting or potent on its own. There has to be a super nature, to keep nature in its rightful, humble place.

It makes us feel special I guess, maybe that’s why we don’t give nature the credit. We’re special either way, but we don’t need special rules to explain how we’re here. For that matter, we don’t necessarily need to explain ourselves to ourselves at all. Whatever happened, we got intelligent at some point, and that’s great. It’s okay to wonder aloud exactly how it happened, but clearly it did. 

In any case, once a rock begins to people like that, you can check on it again in a few thousand years and you’ll notice an unstoppable profusion of buildings everywhere.

People, evidently, will begin to building if left for some time. They’ll building all over the place. And they have — look outside. In two weeks I’m going to be exploring the most buildinged place in the world. Nothing can stop people from their natural propensity for building once it gets started.

The people growing from this rock have indeed buildinged all over the place, maybe a little too much. Roading too. We’ve roaded the hell out of a lot of the landscape. This doesn’t make us distinctly special though. Spiders do something very similar with their silk road networks. They silk all over the place if nothing stops them. Check your attic. It just happens.

I don’t mean to make us sound so one-dimensional. People do much more than building. We wonder. We language. We family. We love.

And as it turns out, people eventually begin to art, and that certainly makes us special, if anything does. If there’s anything that redeems us from our propensity for violence and small-mindedness, that’s it — an inexplicable appetite for the deliberate creation of beauty and meaning.

At first it’s probably only the eccentric person that arts. Cave paintings. Eventually, though, nature takes its inevitable course, and people begin to art as profusely as they building. They art in public, and in private. They art on their desks at school, they art on retaining walls along the railroads, they even art their buildings. They celebrate art and those who art. They just can’t help arting. Try and stop them.

It may not always happen that way. There are people out there that don’t art. There are certainly rocks that don’t people. But clearly nature allows it to happen, and clearly there are places where nothing can stop it from happening. It’s not some violation of the rules. It’s fair game for certain corners of nature to art.

And again, it would be arrogant to assume that nature is not self-directed here. Many people just can’t stand that notion. They insist that nature must have an owner — someone commanding it to produce Guernica or The Beatles — but I don’t see any reason to believe that. Besides, whatever intelligent hierarchy there might be behind nature, there’s no reason not to call it nature too.

Whatever part of nature it is that allows Sgt Pepper to occasionally develop from cooling planets is exactly the part that allows trees to apple profusely, and rocks to people profusely. If evolution means anything, it can’t be only an isolated part of that process.

Evolution can only be the endless network of phenomena creating phenomena — and every conceivable part of life is its product. Using the generous amount of time they were given, the seas produced Old Man and the Sea, and the stars produced Starry Night.

We make a divide between man-made and natural constructs as if it really is two different systems, as if one doesn’t play by the rules of the other. We exalt ourselves by imagining we’re isolated from the system that created us and comprises us.

So it’s encouraging to realize that nature does produce the odd Guernica or Guangzhou Opera House now and then, and that your species is apparently the way it does it. But first some rocks had to do a lot of peopleing to get that level of arting to happen.

On that note, it gets a bit impersonal. Nature churns out people by the millions, and the odd masterpiece gets arted into existence. Most of those people weren’t necessary for that. It’s just part of a the same shotgun approach nature uses when it has mosquitoes give birth to 200,000 babies to give you a chance of getting bitten once or twice.

Think about your role for a moment. You are one of millions, and though it’s rude to say so, the universe doesn’t particularly need you in order to do its thing. But as of right now you certainly do have an extraordinary opportunity. Nothing is stopping you from being a conduit for some of the finest forms the universe ever created. Really. You may not be interested in anything people normally describe as art. That doesn’t matter. Speaking can be an art. Parenting can be an art. Sport can be art.

You don’t need to make masterpieces, but who better to do it? Masterpieces do come from the ingredients you have in you at this moment — the buzz in your bones that won’t let you sit for too long, a mind that can’t stop making inquiries, the desperate need to finally be understood, and whatever capacity for intrigue it took for you read this far into such a bizarre article. These qualities appear to be some of the universe’s rarest and most potent elements, and you’re riddled with them.

These are thoroughly human traits, and they grow in people like seeds grow in apples. Some people can’t bear not to put them to serious use, and would even court poverty to do it. But many people do manage to get right through to their grave without employing them, riding distractions and fleeting pleasures the whole way. It’s easier than ever to do that.

And from nature’s perspective, that’s fine. There are lots of people, and some pretty amazing things will get created no matter what any given individual chooses to spend their time on. But I suspect the human drive to create is more forceful and urgent than we typically give it credit for. The urge for a human to art isn’t a fringe thing or an alternative-lifestyle thing. It’s as vital and fundamental to us as socializing. It’s for everybody. Repressing it may be what’s bothering you all the time.

You have it in heaps. It may be nature’s greatest gift to you. One day that same benefactor will snuff you out like a candle. What a shame it would be if your gift was still in the box.

Yet we all experience a lot of resistance to exploring it, and that resistance comes from many angles. We worry that our work sucks. We makes excuses about talent levels. We see artists who we think suck and we don’t want to be looked at like we look at them. We worry our mothers will shake their heads. We wonder if there really is anything in our own heads worth saying. Throughout life we’re warned by unimaginitive people that it’s not useful to make art, that it doesn’t pay bills or help anyone.

So it’s easy to justify avoiding it, even though some part of you will never stop nagging you to get those seeds out of you and into the ground.

Photos by itonys, wazuluwazu, All Chrome, and Panoramas

If you’re already going strong on a New Year’s resolution, then good for you. Run with it. Don’t let me get in your way.

If you didn’t get around to making one, you didn’t miss anything. In fact you might have dodged a bullet. I’ve made a lot of resolutions that did work out, but none of them began on a January 1st. I figure just about any other day is a better day to make a real change.

The problem with New Years-ing your resolution is that it gives undue weight to the idea of a clean slate. It seems like January first really does reset something, and that it’s important to harness that rare chance.

But of course, it’s just another tomorrow. There are no clean slates. Past failures will still visit you in your head, from whatever year. Bad internal dialogues will still occur, and you’ll still have the same preconceptions about yourself and the kinds of outcomes you can create.

All of this stuff is real, and it doesn’t respect the Gregorian calendar. The glowing Times Square Ball doesn’t have any special powers to obliterate your weaknesses. Making a change must include confronting certain patterns and personal liabilities. You have to take them on willingly as a part of the deal — you can’t trick yourself by pretending they only exist in 2011.

So if you think you need a clean slate to make a change then you’re going to have trouble once you realize a new calendar year doesn’t really clean anything. Self-doubt will appear in 2012 too.

Most people use January 1st because it seems worthwhile to exploit whatever whiff of an advantage it seems to offer. They gravitate towards it as if they recognize that their chances aren’t so good to begin with. Admit you don’t need it, and pick a different day. Pick one that has no sentimental significance, no false help. Don’t even use a Monday.

Of course, if you’re serious about making a change, you know that it isn’t a matter of improving your chances. It’s all up to you, not the fates, so you don’t need to line up your plastic trolls and rabbit’s feet like the old ladies at bingo. You’re much better off if you don’t hang your hopes on anything you don’t plan to control. 

If you pick a day like, say, Thursday, January 12th to mark a new stage in your life, then clearly you intend to build your new beginning right where you actually stand, rather than some mythical “clean” day. If you’re serious about your resolution, you know you don’t need the phony advantage of a fresh year.

In fact, it’s worth avoiding. Too many other people are at the gym for the first time, treadmilling with an an affected kind of determination that won’t be there in February. Too many other people are teetering already, about to relapse and have a cigarette or a drink. Share your resolve with those people and it will feel like you’re all on shaky ground, doomed to fail sooner or later. February is an excellent time to buy almost-new exercise equipment off Craigslist.

Distance yourself from that whole cultural meme and its ever-fading energy. Decide you’ll make a serious effort that doesn’t need a special calendar day.

Most importantly, make it temporary. Thirty-day commitments are doable for almost anyone and they leave you with something real. Unlike lifetime commitments, you can actually get them firmly under your belt, for good, and when you’re done you’re in a truly stronger position to decide how to live. Lifetime commitments to new habits are impossible and unnecessary.

***

Experiment No. 12 — 30,000 words

I’ve never written on an everyday basis. I’m closing in on three years of writing for Raptitude and there has never even been a week in which I’ve written every day. It’s still something I avoid out of habit. I get quite a bit done in a short time when my deadline is looming, but I know that my best writing happens when my deadline isn’t pushing on me.

So I will learn to write every day. A thousand word quota, every day for 30 days.

Sitting down is the hardest part of writing. The second hardest part is to work through the urge to get up. My plan is to sit down early every day and get a thousand words done.

I won’t overcomplicate it like I did my last experiment. Just sit down and write, every day, and don’t get up until the quota is reached.

The experiment will begin Wednesday, January 4th. Keep track of my progress in the experiment log.

***

Brooklyn Bound

Another announcement. This month I’m going to be heading out to the east coast for the first time. The plan is to work through my bucket list, meet a lot of people and take a lot of photographs. My primary destination is New York City, but I’m also going to do a bit of wandering in Vermont, Boston, and Washington DC, then hit Toronto on the way home.

Dates aren’t quite set in stone but it looks like I’ll be arriving in New York January 20th, and leaving for Toronto February 11th-ish.

If you’re in one of those areas and want to meet for coffee and teach me a bit about your home city that would be excellent. Better still, if you can help me do something on The List I would be very grateful and will credit you on the site.

Happy new year.

-David

***

Click here for a good song.

Photo by Barry Yanowitz

It only took about ten Christmases before I realized how quickly the new-toy feeling wears off. I knew by the time New Year’s came around, I would lose that feeling I looked forward to all year — getting up to a dazzling world of new stuff.

Then one Christmas Day I felt that same predictable boredom, the same fading of abundance, creep in by dinnertime. I had eaten more chocolate than could actually be enjoyable, and played with everything once.

I felt like I had definitely lost something substantial since that giddy first hour of the day. Obviously I didn’t own any less by that time (not counting chocolate), but it absolutely felt like I did.

Of course, no matter how I felt about my possessions at different times of day, I was always rich and rarely realized it.

The same is true for me today, probably you too. Average income across the world is about $7000 per year. But that’s just a mathematical mean. The vast majority of people make far less than that. Only about twenty percent of the world’s population lives in countries with an average income that high.

So no matter what class you are in your society, if you’re sitting in front of a computer with some blog-reading time on your hands, you probably outclass (financially anyway) a sizeable majority of people alive today, and certainly almost all of the people who are no longer alive.

But that’s just money. Wealth includes power and privilege too, and not just because you can buy more of those things. It’s reasonable to say that someone with a thousand dollars is less wealthy than someone with a thousand dollars and access to political connections, say. Ability, knowledge, and privilege all contribute to wealth.

You’re probably not doing too poorly on that front either. You’re unlikely to be reading this if you live in North Korea. All sorts of people read this blog, but statistically you probably have the right to vote, the right to protest, the right to say what you like, the right to travel, the right to practice your spiritual tradition, the means to contact your political representatives, the means to practice your chosen art, and the means to self-publish your thoughts. Extraordinary and exclusive privileges, if you have any of them. 

These are riches, if the word means anything at all, and most of history’s humans certainly did not have the level of wealth you do.

It’s unlikely, though, that you would describe yourself as rich, or particuarly that you feel rich.

An iPhone! My Kingdom for an iPhone!

High technology has given superhuman powers to almost all of us, and these are riches of the most enviable kind. Today’s technology extends privilege way further down the economic scale than ever, so that a much wider swath of people can have incredible powers. You certainly have superhuman powers if you have internet access, even if you have to walk to the library to get it.

Imagine if you could transplant your life, and all its advantages, into an iron age society. Your house or apartment gets plopped down on a hillside at the edge of a farming village. All your devices work, you get internet and cable, water and heat. Don’t worry about technical issues like where you get your electricity from, or how you’d get cell service. Assume it is freely available to you within your means, as we tend to assume today.

Outside your doors, humans who are otherwise just like you are getting along with the powers they have available to them — just like you do today. They keep warm with wood stoves, they can work only by the available light of the day, they repair their tools and clothing themselves. They aren’t lesser people by any means, but even the most privileged among them couldn’t even dream of the powers and freedoms you have within arm’s reach right at this moment.

Imagine how they would feel toward you once they learned what you’re able to do with your lot in life. What do you think they might pay for even the simplest of the advantages you have? For walls that easily keep out the worst of the weather, for an accurate timepiece, for a machine that can perform basic math functions instantly without error, or even for a glowing blue cell-phone screen to find something in the dark. Undoubtedly they would be willing to toil an extra day per month to bring these advantages home for their families. Maybe much more than that.

And those powers are nothing compared to what else you can do with your riches. What would they pay to be able to:

• speak to someone across the sea

• have the knowledge of thousand encyclopedias in their pocket

• watch segments of the past (or someone else’s past) unfold in moving pictures, in real time

• see the face or hear the voice of a dead loved one

• heat the house without stoking a fire

• cook food in thirty seconds

• clean and dry their family’s clothing with ten minutes of actual work

• suck the dirt out of a rug

• get all their water from inside the house at whatever temperature they wish

• access instructions on how to do almost anything that can be done by humans

These are insane powers, which most of humanity could never have dreamed of, and they’re all yours, right now. Do you really think more money will make you feel rich if you aren’t blown away by what you already have?

The rich members of past societies may or may not have had more than you in terms of monetary wealth. Yet, it is undeniable that the age you live in gives you access to powers they could never have had, or even imagined. The contents of your crummy apartment certainly would have been worth more to them than all their piles of furs and gold.

And all of this is to say nothing of the intangible privileges you have, just by being alive here and now — rights, freedoms, moral advances, literacy, public education, and modern medicine.

The Makings of Being Rich

You’d think gratitude would increase alongside advantage and privilege. If you have more to be grateful for, you become more grateful. But clearly this isn’t true.

We’ve all heard stories of tycoons who couldn’t be happy, or lottery winners that end up ruined a few years later, wishing it had never happened. I can understand the possibility that having amounts of money that seem copious to you and me might bring certain problems we’re ignorant about. But I still always find myself thinking that these people must be particularly foolish or naive not to be able to make millions of dollars work for them.

But this kind of thinking is what’s naive. We do the same thing. Almost all of us are in an extremely high percentile of material and social wealth, even if you only consider the people who are alive today.

If our standards for wealth are where we sit on that spectrum — and what other standard could we have? — then we’re certainly rich, but how often do we feel rich?

That’s a totally different question. And clearly there is no real value in being rich by any material standard, if we don’t feel rich — if we don’t feel like we have more to be grateful for than most — and of course we do. That feeling of abundance, the opposite of the feeling of lack, is what makes riches attractive to anybody.

I think it’s important to reiterate that point. No matter what material things we pursue, we’re only ever looking for certain feelings. Money is attractive to us because we believe it will come with the feelings we want: abundance, security, power. That’s all the good it can do. Stuck on a desert island with a billion in hard currency is a terrible place to be, because you’re poor in all the things that matter.

How rich we’re able to feel does depend a little on what we do have in terms of privilege and material wealth. It’s hard to achieve feelings of autonomy if you have no clothes or no home. Yet it seems to depend more on what we feel entitled to, what our peers have relative to us — and most importantly — whether we think more about what we do have than what we don’t have.

The Manhattan investment banker who only grosses $96,000 a year probably feels like a have-not when he goes out to lunch with the big dogs. But he probably feels differently about his level of wealth and privilege when he’s being asked for change outside the train station.

How rich he is depends on how rich he experiences himself to be, which is quite independent of his financial bottom line. It’s dependent on how he values what he has and how he values what he doesn’t have, which changes from moment to moment, day to day, year to year. Depending on his perspective, there is a huge range of possible levels of happiness within his means, and that’s every bit as true for you. The influence of our material holdings on our ability to experience wealth is actually quite small.

“Rich” is clearly a relative, emotional state, and your life almost certainly contains far more material (and social) advantages at your disposal than a random human life picked out of a hat. So for most of us, what we need to get rich is not more money, it’s to cultivate a shift in perspective. More money would still leave that necessary perspective shift ahead of you. Chances are you do have the makings of being rich.

If we break it down, the makings of being rich are:

1) Enough stuff to survive in relative comfort. I’m talking about the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid here: food, shelter, water, and decent health.

2) Some extra stuff, beyond the essentials of survival. Some toys, some technology, some art, some tools you could survive without. Most of us have way more than some of this.

3) Some friends. I don’t think this is optional, if you want to feel rich. Humans are highly social and I expect there are few people who can exist in a generally grateful state if they are alone in life. Luckily it is easier than ever to meet other people with like interests. Facebook.com. Meetup.com. Millions of forums worldwide. Use your superpowers here.

4) Some freedoms. Chiefly, to speak your mind and to do your own thing. This varies hugely across modern societies, but if you’re reading this you are probably near the better end of the stick. By the same token, everyone does live under some measure of political constraint, but most of us are still left with an amount of room to pursue happiness that would make most of history’s people envious. People have made rich and worthwhile lives with much worse.

5) The capacity to keep perspective when it comes to assessing a) the value of what you do have, and b) the value of what you don’t have. This is a skill and it can be developed.

Those are the makings, as far as I can see it, and for most people reading this it’s just a matter of working with the last one.

Here are a couple of ways to get better at that:

“Caveman gratitude” – Whenever you use a material posession, think of how valuable it would be to someone who didn’t live in a highly technological world. Remember that you are still only a naked animal, surrounded by a lot of stuff, and even the crappiest of that stuff confers powers that most of the past’s humans would find extraordinarily valuable. What would medieval serfs make of my “crappy” Panasonic point-and-shoot? Yet I have a mid-level Nikon DSLR, and I still salivate over the top-of-the-line stuff. Whenever you feel like a have-not, mentally drop your home and your stuff into an iron-age village and realize again that you live like a monarch with magic powers, right here in the far future.

Own fewer things, but better things – Respect your possessions. Get rid of low quality possessions. Get rid of any possession you don’t respect or use. Have a home for everything in your home, or get rid of it. If you don’t respect your lot in life materially, then you can’t feel like you have a lot worth having, and that’s what being rich amounts to.

Picture losing what’s important to you – This is one of the most worthwhile things I’ve ever learned to do. We just cannot have the necessary perspective to appreciate what we have until we understand what it would mean to lose those things. Do it with your possessions, your rights, and most powerfully, do it with the people you love. Those links will explain how.

Make 2012 your year to get rich.

***

Photo by Maczter

The world’s most famous war photojournalist, Robert Capa, swam ashore with American troops as Life magazine’s official photographer of D-Day.

From the midst of the battle itself, Capa took 106 shots of one of the most famous and important days in history. At the earliest opportunity, the four precious rolls of film were whisked back to London and sent to be developed.

To this day nobody knows what those pictures looked like, because a fifteen-year-old lab assistant set a dryer too high and melted the negatives. Only eleven blurred images were saved from the final roll.

There’s a unique flavor of heartbreak that only comes from your work being destroyed for no good reason. Now, I know it doesn’t carry the same historical magnitude, but last night I think I felt at least a hint of what Capa felt when I saved over today’s article.

While I rewrite it, enjoy an ad-hoc time-constrained installment of The Revolver.

***

One of the more interesting Twitter feeds out there: An Oxford history student is tweeting moment-to-moment updates on the unfolding of World War II, as if it’s happening right now. It’s so compelling because we tend to think of the war with full knowledge of how it turned out, yet the people living it had to watch it unfold day by day with no idea what was happening to the world.

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An interview with me at WriterViews.com, a site about writers learning from writers. The interview is about 40 minutes and is mostly geared towards bloggers. During it I drank a beer stein full of coffee, and it shows.

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A video of North Korean child guitar virtuosos that I find absolutely terrifying and perverse. Yet I can’t look away.

***

The great journalist Christopher Hitchens, who died Thursday, giving a powerful and timely lecture on freedom of speech, and the insane laws that threaten it. The second and third parts are easy to find in the sidebar. It’s about 20 minutes all together.

***

If you want something even easier than reading tweets or watching videos, take a look at my winter photos taken in Winnipeg’s exchange district.

 Photo by Robert Capa

As the story goes, God told Charleton Heston two things to do and eight things not to do, and he listened. Then he passed the rules along to others, and human morality was born.

The commandments weren’t always easy to work with, they found. Specifically, many of them enjoyed violating the one about not killing. Chuck had passed on the divine orders in his own personal style, and couldn’t resist including the Second Amendment in the Ten Commandments somewhere.

There was a real awkward moment when God was telling Chuck specifically not to carve likenesses of anything in the Heavens, precisely at the moment he was carving His words into stone tablets. Chuck had smashed the originals during a tantrum, and without some notes he was always in danger or forgetting what right and wrong were.

This was about 33 centuries ago, and before then there was no right and wrong because the Heavens hadn’t mentioned anything about it yet. Murder and double-parking were rampant.

Even after Chuck and his friends knew the new rules by heart, sometimes they found they did accidentally covet their neighbor’s ox, or even his ass. As they knew, equally offensive to God as coveting one’s neighbor’s livestock was to covet one’s neighbor’s wife, or her ass, or any other material possessions of his neighbor’s. They had an especially tough time with this one, because as pious as they were, it’s really hard to obey rules against thinking.

They didn’t usually steal, except from indigenous populations, until many centuries later when Napster came out and a free-for-all descended that not even God could stop. 

They also kept arguing over whether it was Saturday or Sunday that they were supposed to take off. To this day, most of them think it’s Sunday, and so they stay home to watch NFL football, where they can vicariously enjoy their favorite runningbacks and wide receivers toiling away in total defiance of God.

He doesn’t strike them down, but interestingly it is NFL policy to play through any weather except lightning and hurricanes. These players, heretics though they are, will still sometimes name-drop God or His son as helpful conspirators if they happen to win. God is a Denver Broncos fan these days.

Honoring their father and mother was pretty easy compared to the others, and they took comfort in this. If God ever audited Chuck’s people (and despite His omnipresent threats, He often forgot) they could play up how well they honored their parents, and change the subject before it got to coveting and killing.

They did try their best, but Chuck and his followers found a lot of these commandments to be generally unworkable. The idea behind them was great though, by all accounts: a moral code that’s stamped, sealed and backed up by a well-known name.

But they kept running afoul of themselves. In fact, they slipped up so often that they began to suspect it was all an empty threat. They would never say so out loud, even though God was supposed to be reading all their minds all the time anyway. And so they continued to do the odd bad thing, or even just questionable things, but talked about doing good things all the time.

The problem they had, whether they realized it or not, was that the commandments denied them the opportunity to be moral beings themselves. It was God’s will, not theirs, and so their own individual wills could never be moral, only obedient. They were not invited to participate in either understanding or deciding what is right and wrong.

So the implicit expectation was to throw out any personal feelings that conflicted with what God told them, or what Chuck told them that God had said, or with what some sickly abbot in a church told them that Chuck said that God had said. Trust anyone bearing a cloth or collar before you trust yourself, was the inevitable message, and so they never did.

Now, that means under this system, which billions of people heartily subscribe to, human beings are devoid of any moral sensitivity of their own. Nobody would know, for instance, that pushing someone down the stairs is wrong, unless they’d been to church a few times at least.

It’s a Good thing for us then — I’ll go ahead and assert that without God’s permission — that many people don’t think that’s true at all. I wish I could say most, but statistically it doesn’t look like it.

How to make it all workable

I think that if Mr Heston and his descendants had looked at the Commandments in a different way, they may have gotten more consistent mileage out of them.

While Christianity has its famous dictatorial approach to morality, some other traditions also have moral doctrines, but they present them as precepts.

Precepts aren’t really that different from commandments, in terms of what they are: they’re ethical rules, prescribed by an institution, sometimes attributed to a deity or someone else more important than you. But you can absolutely discover your own.

Some people do treat them just like commandments — follow them, or to Hell with you. But that’s a shame, because they’re missing out on their incredible power. The difference is in how you apply them.

Imagine if instead of obeying a moral precept under threat of punishment, you took it on voluntarily, and the consequences of not doing it were yours to discover. You treat it as a personal commitment, in the service of your God (if you have one) or whatever else is important to you: human solidarity, world peace, evolution, or even just yourself.

Whereas in Christianity you have:

Thou shalt not steal.

in, say, secular Buddhism you might have:

I undertake the rule of training to refrain from taking that which is not freely given.

Same dif, on the surface, but the fact that it is ultimately voluntary is what changes everything. You have to understand why you’re doing it, first of all. You’re allowed to wait until you really are ready to do it, which is only once you’re actually ready to delete all those seasons of Mad Men you lifted from BitTorrent.

From tradition to tradition, the rules aren’t that different. Killing is widely agreed to be a no-no, same with stealing, harming people with your lewd sex acts, and lying.

The value doesn’t come in simply not breaking the rules — because sometimes you will — but in being aware of exactly what’s going on in your mind when you’re tempted to. Where do immoral actions come from? What’s happening in your mind when you’re doing the wrong thing? That knowledge is enormously valuable — if indeed you are interested in peace and happiness — and you can’t get it simply by following orders.

All moral transgressions come down to a decisive moment, between the instant you feel a desire to violate your rule, and the instant you respond to that desire. Most of the time those moments come obscured by the heat of emotions and conditioning, and reaction just happens, without any conscious choice being made. And if you’re Catholic you feel really guilty after.

Observing precepts trains you to become acutely aware in those decisive moments, and prompts you to consider exactly why you’re finding it so hard not to steal something right now. What are you attached to? What rationalizations is your mind coming up with right now?

That is exactly what the commandment approach misses: that moment of reflection on why you have such a hard time following the rule, and why you might want to. Just following the rule because you’re scared not to is a complete avoidance of morality.

The precept approach triggers you to zero in on that crucial moment, and all the feelings, rationales, and possibilities that accompany it. Commandments concern themselves only with the What, and precepts engage the Why, which is the whole reason for morality anyway. Why not kill? If the only reason you have is “To avoid going to Hell,” then Hell might just be the best place for you.

Whether you violate the rule or not is not as important as whether you watch what happens internally as that decisive moment comes and goes. This is where morality comes from — the direct, voluntary experience of doing the right thing (or not doing it), and the direct experience of the consequences that arise as a result.

In those moments, when you become aware of the pull toward doing the lazy thing, the easy thing, or the wrong thing, and you consciously don’t do it, there is an incredible feeling of freedom. That’s what morality is, freedom from the grinding mechanical hell of acting from fear, lust or reaction. Like I’ve said before, Hell is real, and it doesn’t wait for you to die.

Chuck and his epic cast never knew this kind of freedom. They were under perpetual peril and did what any self-preserving people would do. Commandments can’t supply morals because they deny you the autonomy to do the right thing.

The commandments leave you no freedom. The moral landscape they create is the opposite of freedom. It’s oppression, especially when you remember that you’re forced to play the game for eternity.

As Christopher Hitchens sometimes puts it, “It’s a celestial dictatorship, where eternal praise and submission is demanded. A divine North Korea, if you will. But at least you can fucking die and leave North Korea.”

***

Photo by David Cain

***

“Your experiments are the most interesting part of the site for me, but you don’t talk about them much and you haven’t done one in a while. Are those old experiments still a part of your life?”

He wasn’t the first one to ask that. I’ve always felt like I should post updates, but I don’t like to make posts that aren’t standalone articles, or to tack on little updates at the ends of other posts.

So I’ve mostly just left the experiments alone after they’re finished. But I’ve invested a lot in them, and the point has always been to create a lasting change.

They have. Next Saturday it will have been 1000 days since I started Raptitude, and I am a pretty different person than the guy who launched the blog. The writing habit is what I credit (or blame) for a lot of that, but my experiments have also left big changes to my personality, lifestyle and values. I’m now past 10,000 total days in my life, and honestly this last thousand have been my favorite ones. Thank you for playing your part in that.

So for those who have asked, and for readers who have never ventured into the little-known back rooms behind the front page of this blog, here is (briefly) the current status of each of my Raptitude experiments. [Note: except the seventh one, which was a second attempt at the first one and was even more disastrous.]

No. 1 — Sharpening the Mind

The gist: To make sitting meditation a habit by doing it for 20 minutes every day. I had for a long time meditated intermittently, but never as a daily habit.

The initial result: I struggled. Partly because it was suddenly a duty, I became positively enraged every time I sat down. It was bizarre how reliably I became furious, but that was what mostly happened.

Where I am with it today: The rage doesn’t happen any more, and I find it interesting how prominent a feeling it was in my experiment log. The following year I christened a lengthy backpacking trip with a five-day Buddhist meditation retreat. I learned a lot more about technique, and I had to come to terms with some of my initial hindrances because I was spending up to eight hours a day meditating. 

However, I still do not meditate on a regular basis. I have tried repeatedly, and the problem seems to be choosing a regular time to do it. At the end of the day I’m too sleepy and have little intention, and in the morning I’m too cranky. I’ve found meditation to have a consistent, profound effect on my life and I know it is sorely needed. I intend to take it up seriously again soon, but this time without a public experiment.

***

No. 2 — Strength, Soviet Style

The gist: To dive into a six-week daily kettlebell program and see what physical changes I see in such a short timeframe.

The initial result: I had a setback — an injury — midway through, and ended up extending the experiment to nine weeks to recover lost ground. But I did get a hell of a lot stronger quickly. The results were not particularly visible though, but I posted a before/after picture anyway.

Where I am with it today: Like meditation, I’ve been on and off. I am currently in the longest “off” period I’ve had since my nine-month trip. My job became incredibly busy between May and October this year, and I haven’t climbed back on the wagon yet. I’ve got time off coming up and I’m looking forward to picking up the bells again.

***

No. 3 — 30 Days Without Drugs

The gist: Go thirty straight days without using any sort of drugs. In particular I was interested in the effects of cutting out alcohol and caffeine, both of which I was a regular user. The goal was to see how hard it would be, and what effects it would have on my working and social lives.

The initial result: Went every minute of the thirty days, and I felt fantastic almost all the time. My sleep was better, I didn’t have to depend on others to transport me when I had a few beers, and money stuck around longer in my wallet. It was extremely revealing to learn how drugs play a huge social role in even normal people’s lives, and the final report is well worth reading.

Where I am with it today: Both substances are back in my life but I have better relationships with them. I fell under the spell of New Zealand’s espresso culture while I was there and now I drink coffee in homemade latte form. I did develop a fairly steady daily Starbucks habit when I returned though, because they’re the only ones in town who can make a drinkable soy latte (except me.) But I no longer use it as a prod to get me to work.

As for alcohol, I drink to excess far less often now. It is just too costly in terms of time, and when I do it it feels like I’m chasing something from the past. It used to be a lot more fun than it is now. Alcohol is not gone from my life, and I’m glad for that, but I no longer consider it to have negative effects on my life. My body is far more sensitive to both substances now and I am quite careful with them.

***

No. 4 — Defensive Eating

The gist: To renegotiate my relationship with food by doing the following for 30 days: 1) Eat whatever you like, but 2) never eat until you are full, 3) Eat only when you’re hungry, and 4) Drink only water — treat every other beverage as food.

The initial result: I found that mealtimes and meal choices are very highly controlled by cultural norms. It was hard to wait until you’re hungry when everyone else is ready to eat. I did become a lot more conscious about eating, but it did not solve my unhealthy relationship with food.

Where I am with it today: Eighteen months later, I went vegan and it pretty much eliminated my bad relationship with food. My diet is now entirely plant-based, I eat far less junk food, far less “target of opportunity” food, and I prepare for myself most of what I eat. Today, my eating habits constantly defy cultural norms in all sorts of ways anyway, so social pressures don’t lead to overeating for me anymore.

***

No. 5 — 21 Days Without Complaining

The gist: I took up the “No Complaint Challenge” which is to go 21 consecutive days without complaining or criticizing aloud. If you screw up even once, you start back at zero.

The initial result: This was fascinating. It took 55 days altogether, but I learned that there are all kinds of other ways to communicate negativity. Some of those 55 days were during a down-and-out period in a foreign city, and I was pretty damn miserable inside even though I didn’t say so. However, it really did kill the offhand impulse to complain. The experiment log is interesting.

Where I am with it today: My impulse to complain is still just as subdued as it was. It really did retrain the thought process that results in complaining and criticizing for me. But as I discovered in the experiment, what you end up verbalizing doesn’t always reflect what is going on inside you, and I still do have frequent bouts of negativity. I do recommend doing this experiment, but don’t believe creator Will Bowen when he says that the internal talk will clean itself up. It won’t.

***

No. 6 – Logging Everything I Do, All Day

The gist: To write down every single thing I do, and how long it takes me, for a week.

The initial result: I did it, and it created an instant productivity boost. Because you know you have to write down “Seventeen minutes sitting on my bed daydreaming” you end up not doing things that clearly aren’t worth the time investment. It’s really quite exhausting to do that and a week was more than enough.

Where I am with it today: This was a prep exercise for a period of super-productivity that never happened. I was in New Zealand at the time, and I was always dealing with the conflict between getting things done and trying to be carefree while I’m overseas. It really was the wrong time to try to put my nose to the grindstone. It was helpful to see where my time goes, though, and I may do it again now that I’m in a stable living situation.

***

No. 8 – Five New Habits With Very Low Standards

The gist: The idea was to introduce five new daily habits at once, making it feasible by setting an extremely low standard for each. For example: three reps of kettlebells, five minutes of promoting my blog, ten minutes of visualization, et cetera. Ideally, I would make each of these a tiny “foot in the door” habit, making it easy to expand any or all of them later.

The initial result: Disastrous experiment. Totally stupid idea. I ended up having five useless tasks at the end of every day that I really didn’t want to do and didn’t expect to gain anything from. I quit early and it was the right thing to do.

Where I am with it today: There was never a chance of doing this for a month, let alone for a lifetime. Just a bad idea altogether and it felt great to abandon it.

***

No. 9 — A Place for Everything

The gist: I wanted to get rid of everything in my home that did not have a proper place to sleep at night. Every possession I wanted to keep had to have a shelf, box, or hook where it lived. That way I could make sure all my possessions were useful and respected, and I could clean everything up in a few minutes each night.

The initial result: Brilliant! I got rid of an enormous amount of stuff and for once knew where everything was. It only took ten minutes to return it all “home” at the end of the day. I had always lived in an untidy space, and suddenly I was an extremely organized person. It blew my mind and had an extraordinary effect on my life, including how I slept, cooked, worked and what it felt like to wake up every morning.

Where I am with it today: I’m still way tidier than I was, but I have slipped from my “Everything in it’s place” dream-come-true. I’ve acquired a number of things that do not have a proper place, which makes the nightly cleaning ritual a much more taxing thing to do, which means it often doesn’t get done. Bad broken window effect here. In the last two months in particular, I’ve let things get a bit ragged. But I do plan to re-audit my possessions before the year’s out, and the tough work has already been done. This was a great experiment and I highly recommend doing it.

***

No. 10 — Vegan for 30 days

The gist: I decided to cut all animal foods out of my diet for 30 days, and during that time learn about the ethical issues surrounding animal use. After that I would decide how I want to live.

The initial result: The new diet clicked rather quickly. It seemed to resolve a lot of contradictions that had been floating around in my life. But the most prominent effect was on how I felt physically. I had no idea how taxing meat (and especially dairy) had been on my system, and I had no interest in going back. It also solved my long-standing ugly relationship with heavy foods.

Where I am with it today: I’m still vegan and have never reconsidered. No other experiment created such a huge change in my life. It changed the way I look at the humanity at large, at morality, at health, at social structures, at animals, at the concept of consciousness, at my culture and at my role in all of it. Best thing I ever did.

***

No. 11 — An Attack on Procrastination

The gist: To attack my atrocious procrastination problem with a few simple rules, including checking in at the end of the day, and acting immediately whenever I notice I’m procrastinating.

The initial result: I started off with three incredibly productive days, and that after that my enthusiasm completely tapered off and the experiment never really ended. It just dragged on forever and I stopped enforcing my rules. It made me realize procrastination is far more complex than I initially presumed.

Where I am with it today: Somehow I’ve almost gotten worse as a result. The experiment left me feeling like I have even less power over it than I imagined. It was one of my more discouraging experiments. My inbox is stacked higher than it’s ever been and at the moment I’m really quite disorganized. Part of the reason it has worsened recently is because I’m on the cusp of a leave of absence from my work, which the slippery part of my mind interprets as a license to let certain things slide until my large swath of free time arrives. Not so smart, but I’m optimistic about how I will handle it. History tells me momentum builds quickly once I start knocking things off.

***

So I figure I’m batting about .500 with my experiments, in terms of immediate success. However, no matter how they went each one has given me insights and experience that make life easier in one way or another.

As you might have guessed, experiment 12 is right around the corner. There are two possiblities for it, and I’ll choose one and announce it soon. Also, if you have any ideas for future experiments, I’d love to hear them. Let me be your guinea pig.

I’ve also received a lot of emails and comments from those of you who have joined in on some of my experiments. I know quite a few people tried out vegan diets, everything-in-its-place households, and non-procrastination regimens alongside me. I’d love to hear how you did in the comment section.

Photo by David Cain

I was curious, so I conducted an anthropological experiment which ended when I was asked to leave the store by a senior dishwasher salesman.

This year, Canadians — or at least the people who sell them things — have openly embraced the dubious American phenomenon known as Black Friday, even though our Thanksgiving happens on a Monday in October.

Up here our consumer culture isn’t really that different than it is south of us, it’s just a little more self-conscious and toned down. Canadians would be embarrassed to buy, for example, a velvet-and-rhinestone painting of a waterfall at a truck stop, or a five-pound pack of Nibs. And so it’s not on offer up here. I kind of like that, and I guess that’s why the widely-welcomed invasion of Black Friday left me a little uneasy at first. I liked our Canadian consumer self-consciousness while it lasted.

Maybe it’s not so bad. It’s a symbiotic relationship that was bound to happen. Retailers are always looking for The Sale, and customers are always looking for The Deal. Black Friday is a day when both parties are guaranteed to get what they’re looking for with no shame implied on the part of either, and I guess there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a little like what happens when the fleet comes into port and the local seaside establishments turn on their red lights.

This exchange is happening all the time, but Christmas is when the retailers really want to get the turnstiles spinning. There’s nothing terribly clever about the way they market their clothes and perfumes and phones, certainly nothing more clever than the now-ancient custom of pricing an item at $9.99 instead of ten dollars.

They don’t need to be clever, because both parties come to the table willing. And maybe that’s why it’s all so absurd. We’re so used to waif-proportioned mannequins and plastic Santa Villages that their ridiculousness is almost transparent to us.

So that’s why I went to the mall with my Nikon this weekend. The plan was to take images of the decked halls and gay apparel, then go do something in real life like read a book or walk in the park, and then look at the photos later when I’ve detoxed from the mall air, and see how silly it all really is.

The whole Christmas mall menagerie is so silly that it can barely offend anymore. It doesn’t warrant a serious condemnation, and being hard-nosed about it is a little like picketing a WWE event to convince showgoers that it isn’t real wrestling. More than anything I wanted to be entertained, and I was.

What fascinates me in particular are the images and displays that retailers use to lubricate this mass-transaction and get us in the mood. Fake boughs of holly hung with no hint of irony or kitch. Sterile plastic trees with wrapped empty boxes beneath them. White, flaky fuzz sprayed on window-corners by the canload, meant to remind us of some Charles Dickens book we know about but have never read. 

The mannequins alone, with their severe faces and swagger, appear so fashion-serious and superior yet remain unable to dress themselves, and that makes me laugh inside.

Having said all that I had never really looked at the Christmas shopping frenzy critically before, because normally by the time I get to the mall it’s already December 20th, my list is only a quarter done, and I have to engage myself in the parade very seriously.

On my trip to the mall I noticed two distinct themes they used to move product.

1) The Ideal Human

The most prominent theme I encountered was the ideal human. Products used to be sold on the emphasis of their own merits. But for the last fifty years, products have been sold by deliberately associating the product with the person you want to be.

I have mentioned this before. There’s a gem of a quote that makes this explicit:

[Our economy] demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption. The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumptive patterns.

~American retail analyst Victor Lebow [emphasis mine]

During my trip to the mall I found two specific incarnations of the ideal human, sometimes together but usually separate — giant, perfect faces, and slender, perfect bodies.

Many times the bodies didn’t need heads of their own. The heads were presented separately with more force, wilder colors, and usually an accompanying fragrance.

I found different versions of the same face staring at me everywhere. I presume it is the face I want to have, either as my own or as that of my significant other. Sometimes it was prominent, other times subtle. But there was nowhere you could stand in a department store where there wasn’t at least one large, ideal face looking at you.

And more often they were presented in multiples — entire squadrons of the same ideal face in fours and sixes, the way indie bands staple their concert posters to dominate public bulletin boards. More must be better.

You. This could be you. And it’s on sale.

We should know better. We’re smart people and this should not influence us. But it must, because it is absolutely everywhere.

I think we know it’s a lie but hope that it is only mostly untrue, because then buying the product might made us at least fractionally more like the person we want to be.

It’s the same reason they still advertise a five dollar item as $4.99. It’s not that we’ve never seen this trick before. It’s so ubiquitous that it seems like it couldn’t possibly trick us. But it remains ubiquitous precisely because it still does work.

2) The storebought sentiment

If there were any moments when I did feel a real pang of offense, it was when the human bustle died down for a second and I could hear Bing Crosby singing faintly over the PA, as if he approved of the whole circus. Of course they have every reason to play Christmas songs at Christmas, but I felt like this one was a genuine corruption of the Christmas spirit. It is, conspicuously, still November, and to me the playing of I’ll Be Home For Christmas came off as a cheap shot, like when they bring you a free drink in the casino just as you start winning, so that you stay at the machine until you aren’t anymore.

There were little bits of this forced sentiment everywhere, and other than the hijacking of Christmas music I hold dearly, it was fairly harmless.

Nothing gets me in the mood to buy a diamond like storebought cookies and a dollar-store Santa hat.

At this moment my local mall probably contains over 500 semi-trailers’ worth of fake trees, plastic reindeer, frosted metallic balls and tinsel. All of it was bought and trucked in to try to stir up the spending impulse in me and my fellow citizens. For this I pass no judgment on retailers, because evidently we are happy to pay for it all.

But, among all of this flamboyant holiday stuff, there were two important Christmas-related figures that were conspicuously absent in all of the advertising and hall-decking:

Average-looking people, and Jesus.

The birthday boy Himself isn’t welcome at the mall. Bad for business. And so, I guess, are honest representations of the people paying for the whole thing.

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All photos by David Cain