I’m a romantic and a realist, but I have them backward for most peoples’ liking.
Someone comes to me in the pouring rain with a devastating problem and says, “It’s going to be all right, isn’t it?”
I say, “I don’t know. Frankly, it may not. But either way, rain is so beautiful, let’s stand here and enjoy it while we can.”
They want me to say, “Yes, oh yes, it’s going to be all right! So let’s get out of this pouring rain.”
So after I was the Linux guy for a number of years in the ’90s, I was the eBay guy for a number of years in the ’00s and ’10s. I’ve had lots of questions and frustration over the years from sellers annoyed by what they saw to be eBay’s draconian policies toward policing sellers and their behavior.
Though I haven’t worked at eBay for many, many years now, I still work at a company and in an industry with deep eBay connections, and that fact, combined with my particular shopping and collecting habits, means that I still buy and sell on eBay quite a lot.
For any sellers that have contacted me in the last year with those same complaints about eBay’s anti-seller policies that assume all sellers to be crooks, here’s a little anecdote.
I recently ordered an inexpensive (less than $20.00) item on eBay from a seller with a reasonable feedback profile and score. There was no particular indication of anything wrong with the item in the listing, other than the fact that it was used.
Today I received it. Here are some facts about what I received:
Now, imagine receiving a purchase like this if you are not a veteran eBay buyer and seller who knows what to do about such things. You’re the average person who makes only periodic online purchases, and then only periodically from eBay, because people tell you that it’s downmarket and risky.
If this is one of your few experiences on eBay, are you ever going to shop there again? And if you (and others with similar experiences) stop shopping there, is that good for sellers?
Even if you’re a tremendously conscientious seller who would never deliver a product in that state, it’s to everyone’s benefit—buyers and sellers alike—for eBay to ensure that any and all such experiences are stamped out.
And I personally want eBay to survive for a very, very long time, if not forever. Because there are just so many things that I personally like to shop for that can’t really be bought anywhere else.
— § —
On another note, every now and then I reflect on being the “Linux guy” or the “eBay guy” and the kids of writing and public communication I did in those roles.
I have and have had lots of hard-won knowledge in other areas over the years. Computer science. Social science. Literature. I have earned four college degrees, including a Ph.D., from very good universities. I have lots of powerful, specialized knowledge and skills.
But of course nobody has ever really offered to pay me for any of that. What did pay? Knowing how to shell-script in Linux and trade successfully on eBay. Very pedestrian stuff.
I understand intellectually why this is the case, but the young, naive philosopher in me doesn’t like it, at least not as a normative proposition.
The world ought to be different. It ought to be better!
It isn’t. Peoples’ lives are very small. This is why there is such a gap between elite and non-elite. Elites are the rare breed that live in an earth-sized world, and so have all of the resources of earth available to them. Non-elites live in a world the size of a single-family dwelling, plus a few roads and a big box store. Their resources are thus necessarily very limited.
Whatever the particulars of this case, this sort of conflict doesn’t surprise me. In fact, I’m surprised we don’t see an awful, awful lot more of it. See also the recent spate of reports and research similar to this.
The fact is that the current path to tenure is itself highly unbalanced, requiring levels of self-sacrifice and life-course risk-taking that few sane people would be able to justify. In the current structure of the academy at the public four-year level and above, we select precisely for the people that are most likely to do unreasonable things, since pursuit of the path to tenure is itself a highly unreasonable thing to undertake.
We compound this problem by imposing on candidates virtually no requirements for emotional maturity, and in fact often seeing such maturity as a liability and a negative indicator for fitness (since emotional maturity is directly linked to a realization that the path to tenure is an unreasonable thing to undertake).
The people that are selected for are irrationally driven, highly unbalanced in their lifestyles, hugely self-negating, must be completely focused on a single, tiny, and arcane facet of human life (to demonstrate any interest in other areas of human existence at all marks one as “unserious,” as I was once called on my path to the Ph.D., and precisely for that reason), and so on.
In short, the ideal candidate for a tenured professor, particularly beyond the STEM fields, is generally a taught, workaholic loner who overestimates the importance and depth of their work and opinions to a degree that would be (and often is) seen as comical outside the academy, and is so single-mindedly dedicated to their own success (defined as their ability to maintain this overestimation indefinitely and at greater and greater levels) that they are willing to essentially self-destruct entirely on a personal and emotional basis to continue to achieve it.
If you don’t meet these criteria, you aren’t seen as a candidate. And the powers that be are fairly explicit, along the way, about asking you whether or not you think you will be able to adopt this perspective, set of emotional habits, and self-negating lifestyle.
Why, exactly, are we surprised when the professors start to turn out to be a bit unbalanced? Being unbalanced is the first and most basic requirement for the job, in most cases. And why are we surprised when conflicts emerge? We’ve taken all of these unbalanced people and stuck them together in a high-risk, low-reward pressure cooker of diminishing returns, then surrounded them by a limitless number of immature, often drunken kids who catastrophically and often pettily overestimate their own importance and often have yet to learn respect for much of anything.
Frankly, it’s a recipe for rioting, violence, and complete social insanity. I’m shocked that it doesn’t come to the fore all the time.
There is no magic bullet. Have to remember that. In life, at work, in anything. It’s easy to slide from “try to be efficient and find the shortest distance between two points” to “look for the magic bullet.”
Only there is no magic bullet. There is only day by day, the long few, and the slog. I used to be pretty good at keeping this top-of-mind, and doing the slog, but I think the last few years have left me with some inconvenient habits of mind.
One of them is the tendency to think, without realizing it, about magic bullets. No, no, no. There is no magic bullet.
— § —
Young folks tend not to appreciate the extent to which their lives are pretty convenient. I was that way, too. Lots of song and dance about problems and frustrations and unjust this-and-that, relatively little appreciation of the fact that they will never again have it so good (and a general dislike of the tendency of those older than they are to suggest this repeatedly).
But it’s true. And I put convenience at the top of the list when it comes to considering things how things are more difficult as one ages.
Right now in my life, very few things are convenient. When I was younger, despite what I thought, almost everything was convenient. Want to move? Do it! Want to make a purchase? If you have a job, make it! Want to go on a date? Pick the time! Want to go back to school? Well why not?! Need something that you don’t have on hand? Make a trip to the store!
There were no real obstacles but my own initiative—and cash, of course, which young people complain endlessly about, but even that often boils down to initiative—so almost anything could be done.
Now nothing comes easy. Something is in the way of every last thing. A pretty good foundation must be laid even for a trip to the store. Many things simply can’t be done. Everything is a risk-reward-cost-benefit calculation, suffused with compromises. Life becomes much more labor-intensive, and decisions much less about “whether to” and much more about “which to.”
Of course I have no illusion that I am experiencing the nadir of convenience in my life. It remains convenient, at least, to walk across the living room if I want to do so, or to have a glass of water.
In another thirty or forty years, should I live that long, even that those things will no longer be convenient. Bodily movement and energy reserves will gradually become a bigger and bigger issue and calculation, and a glass of water becomes not just something to stand up and get, but in fact something with ripple effects that last throughout the afternoon—a glass of water means a washed glass as well as a trip to the restroom later on. Three inconvenient trips just to get a drink. Maybe not worth it.
If there was some way to impress upon young folks just how wide open the world is to them, and just how much the drag on everything they do will increase as their life goes on, the world would be a much more productive place.
For my own part, I’ve got to internalize all I’ve just said and realize that while things may not now be as convenient as they used to be, they will become less and less convenient with every year that passes.
So if I have anything that I want to get done or any grand changes that I want to make in life, well… the sooner the better.
Sometimes resentment creeps in. I try not to let it, but by god, sometimes it just does. I suppose it will always be that way.
So much sacrifice. So much self-negation, trying to live up to things, chipping away at my future in the process for so many years. And now of course I am well off the path, not sure what to do. There are times when I feel as though I was stupid in all of the ways that my elders always told me not to be.
No, I’m not bitter, but I do realize just how much I’ve given up, and just how little the sacrifices are understood or appreciated by anyone but myself.
It’s a hollow thing to destroy yourself for others in ways that they can’t fully appreciate. Hollow and pointless. Word to the wise, for the young: don’t do it. Stick to your plan. The presence of other people can’t compensate for you being yourself and putting your life in order.
And anyone that appears to need you to disarrange your life is probably not someone that it makes sense for you to spend much time with, no fault of theirs or yours. It just can’t be good for anyone in the end.
Predictably, the backlash has begun against Chicago’s statement to incoming freshman that neither trigger warnings nor safe spaces are closely held values of the institution. And of course out come also the expected calls for “more diversity” in Chicago’s environs and curricula.
Short opinion: diversity has no inherent value that I care about. Diversity purely for diversity’s sake is a form of selfishness and navel-gazing, as of its own account it accomplishes and has accomplished comparatively little for human instrumentalism—certainly nothing to justify that incredible aggregate allocation of resources that it now commands. It is primarily a way of enriching particular individuals for their personal consumption and their personal emotional sustenance. Nothing less, nothing more. Claims related to comparative enrichments do little for me, as enrichments vary in any number of ways that we can slice and dice into demographic strata, race and gender being just some of these, and arbitrarily chosen ones at that from the gestalt perspective. “Diversity” advocates are asking that all of society slow and self-subvert in order to indulge their own feelings of inadequacy or to soothe their own personal experiences of suffering. They are playing the power game while claiming to be playing the justice game.
Screw diversity and all of the diversity talk. Those that argue that we have mistaken the private for the public and vice-versa are spot on. Your skin color, what you do in bed, and so on are purely private matters and have nothing to do with the operation of society. Who cares? Be who you are. Do what you do. Only don’t be it and do it in public, where performance with respect to instrumentality is all that matters. So many claims of having been “discriminated against” are founded on the perceived lack of acceptance of purely private characteristics in the public sphere.
I’ll adopt the position that your private characteristics have no bearing on the public sphere, that the “acceptance” of your private characteristics has no relevance to anything that society ought to particularly care about, and that in general, with a few exceptions related to forms of interaction that actually prevent you from being productive society members, should not even be discussed in the public realm. If your private characteristics are leading to an impoverishment of the public sphere in some way other than the circular (“loss of diversity”), then let’s talk. That is to say that if the fact of your being non-white or LGBT are causing, through thus influenced complications in social interaction, planes to fall out of the sky, areas of the economy to trend downward, or diseases to multiply, then fair enough and fair game and let’s work on it.
If, on the other hand, the fact of your being non-white or LGBT are causing, by way of complications in social interaction, nothing more than “a lack of non-white and LGBT voices in public,” then fuck you. Because race and LGBT have nothing to do with anything. Just as white and straight have nothing to do with anything. They’re purely after-dinner cocktail party trivia and they ought to stay there. Why do you expect your bathroom stall reality or your family history to have anything to do with getting your fucking job done and everyone else doing the same?
This is a massive nexus of distraction and self-indulgence created by misfiring units actively seeking to sow distraction in the midst of the great telos of human survival. Oooh, like that word? Shocked? I’ll say it again: Telos! Telos, telos, telos! Not “human survival” as in you, or as in individuals, but “human survival” as in species.
Let’s put it another way. You are not that important. No one is. What is important is the collective. Family is the smallest of these, but before that and more important, corporate body and community, and before that and more important still, nation, and before that and most important of all, species.
So keep your identity under wraps and perform your function when in public. It is time to walk all this bullshit back.
§ As you get older, the ghosts become more real than anything else.
§ Under the leaves, soil. Under the soil, stone. Under the stone, souls.
§ Radically empowering individuals in society may be the worst mistake we ever made.
§ Want to be a radical? Refuse to suffer. Then, wait for the assault.
§ Goodbye 2017, part two. (The real part.)
§ Sometimes you find home where you’ve never been—and you dwell where you aren’t.
§ The self can’t play Atlas for postmodernity because science is now supernatural.
§ Rehab is universal. So is history.
§ Identity, transcendence, and tactics.
§ Untitled. (a.k.a. Pretty faces, new old photos.)