A long rant about things I'm not qualified to rant about

Something bothered me today. I just returned home from Las Vegas last night and moving slowly today stopped by one of the 9 starbucks in walking distance from my building and found the style section of the Washington Post. Front cover of that section was this piece.

Now, I like some, if not most, of these movies. And, I agree with the thrust of the article that it's a little weird there's all these movies deal with stunted adulthood, but it's nothing new. I mean, Hamlet could be lumped into this genre if you really want to get into the weeds about it. But the end is what bothers me:

But in the 15 years since the release of "Reality Bites," this lugubriousness appears to have crept upward into older demographics. Not just post-college, but post-grad school, post-dating, post-marriage. These characters have jobs, they have relationships, and yet they still fret endlessly that they are not grown up enough, that they haven't unlocked the secret of adulthood. As if being an adult ever meant more than fumbling through each day the best one could and remembering to schedule dentist appointments.

Why do they do this? Haven't they been reading the books written specifically for them? Haven't they been meeting with their life coaches and attending their Chrysalis workshops, targeted toward women 23 to 33, costing only $600?

The thought-provoking answer is: Maybe they have. Maybe after a decade of reading that their age group is completely incompetent, that normal life stages should be considered a crisis, and that they need seminars and self-help books just to help them reach that elusive adulthood alive, they have started to live down to expectations.

Which means that Burt and Verona are not screw-ups. They're the new normal.

Ick. Let's unpack this, cause there is a lot that pisses me off here.

The best and truest line in the whole thing is the one about remembering dentist appointments. That's the genius behind works like Mad Men and The Sopranos - it doesn't matter who you are, if you have a brain and a heart you will fumble with issues of growing up, well into your 40s, apparently. As to being uniquely and completely incompetent? Have you seen the economy recently? An entire generation honestly believed that housing prices would rise in perpetuity and that we'd never have to worry about our creditors calling. How's that for competence? I hardly think we could do worse. Don't get me started on Clinton, Bush, the environment, America's international standing, post Beatles-Zepplin-Who-Stones popular music, drugs, divorce, abortion, etc.

"Fret endlessly that they aren't grown up enough and haven't unlocked the secret to adulthood?" Give me a fucking break. That's like asking "What's the secret to being in shape?" Answer? Get off your ass! There's no short-cuts, unfortunately folks. Checking off boxes of jobs, marriage, kids, mortgage gets you no closer to being an adult. That's just the way it is. Being an adult seems more to me about your attitudes and priorities than it is about what you have. Every day, you're faced with hundreds, if not thousands of decisions about what to do next. By the time you're 18, usually, you have enough experience to at least, weigh the consequences of your decision. You won't always see things correctly, and you won't always choose correctly, but the difference between adults and children is not just what they choose but how they choose.

In last month's Atlantic, an expose about the great Harvard Longitudinal Studies sheds a lot of light on this part of it. George Valliant, the lead researcher, breaks it down like this:

Yet, even as he takes pleasure in poking holes in an innocent idealism, Vaillant says his hopeful temperament is best summed up by the story of a father who on Christmas Eve puts into one son’s stocking a fine gold watch, and into another son’s, a pile of horse manure. The next morning, the first boy comes to his father and says glumly, “Dad, I just don’t know what I’ll do with this watch. It’s so fragile. It could break.” The other boy runs to him and says, “Daddy! Daddy! Santa left me a pony, if only I can just find it!”

The story gets to the heart of Vaillant’s angle on the Grant Study. His central question is not how much or how little trouble these men met, but rather precisely how—and to what effect—they responded to that trouble. His main interpretive lens has been the psychoanalytic metaphor of “adaptations,” or unconscious responses to pain, conflict, or uncertainty. Formalized by Anna Freud on the basis of her father’s work, adaptations (also called “defense mechanisms”) are unconscious thoughts and behaviors that you could say either shape or distort—depending on whether you approve or disapprove—a person’s reality.

Vaillant explains defenses as the mental equivalent of a basic biological process. When we cut ourselves, for example, our blood clots—a swift and involuntary response that maintains homeostasis. Similarly, when we encounter a challenge large or small—a mother’s death or a broken shoelace—our defenses float us through the emotional swamp. And just as clotting can save us from bleeding to death—or plug a coronary artery and lead to a heart attack—defenses can spell our redemption or ruin. Vaillant’s taxonomy ranks defenses from worst to best, in four categories.

At the bottom of the pile are the unhealthiest, or “psychotic,” adaptations—like paranoia, hallucination, or megalomania—which, while they can serve to make reality tolerable for the person employing them, seem crazy to anyone else. One level up are the “immature” adaptations, which include acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria, projection, and fantasy. These aren’t as isolating as psychotic adaptations, but they impede intimacy. “Neurotic” defenses are common in “normal” people. These include intellectualization (mutating the primal stuff of life into objects of formal thought); dissociation (intense, often brief, removal from one’s feelings); and repression, which, Vaillant says, can involve “seemingly inexplicable naïveté, memory lapse, or failure to acknowledge input from a selected sense organ.” The healthiest, or “mature,” adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship).

So, Adults more consistently choose or involuntarily act in Mature or at least Neurotic defense. But more importantly, it's not what they choose but how they choose their reality, as in the story about the two boys. My friend Jessi over at her blogspot just had a post all about this and it's no shock that the vast majority of training at my recent company retreat was about managing client's expectations. It's important and totally trainable. You might be such a head case that you need medicine and will never be fully mature, but the vast majority of people aren't that screwed up to begin with. Philosophically, this all dove tails nicely with Frankl, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and other stoics. For great primers on them check out Tim Ferris's latest post or read Ryan Holiday.

But that's not the worst part of the WaPo article: "Maybe they have... and are living down to expectations...They aren't screw-ups, they are the new normal."

There's two things here that really get my goat. First, anyone living in a shanty (a real shanty, not the "I'm a liberated beach bum who needs few possessions" shanty) at 34 is a screw-up, plain and simple. Like I said before, you can't just check boxes, but if you find yourself working a job you do ironically, sublimating that anger by dressing hipster, and having zero idea about where you want to raise your rapidly approaching family - you might have made some wrong decisions. Navel gazing is important when you've got to make important decisions like "What kind of life do I want to live?" If you "find" yourself in shit, it's probably because you didn't stop to decide what it is you wanted and an idea of how to get there (i.e. failure to plan is planning to fail).

The double edged sword of it is: You can't and shouldn't plan everything. You're not in serious trouble if you don't have it all figured out or if your plan has several gaping holes in it. I can't help but chortle privately at my friend's parents who think that having a history degree and no real job prospects not a month out of graduation is a serious impediment to their daughter's happiness or success. Ignoring the fact that this is the worst recession of my life so far, it's taken me 2 years to find a job I like with a contract longer than 6 months, and I am doing better than most of the people that graduated from my HS class! She is smarter than I am and just as enterprising - I'm not worried about her at all, so long as her parents get out of her way. It is even funnier because her father - the one who thinks she's in big trouble -barely finished college and bounced around for 10 years in a dead end job until he met her mother, at which point things began to come together for him. His expectations are so hypocritical and factually baseless she ought to just ignore them entirely and live the life she wants - as soon as she figures out what that is.

There's no new normal, in other words, and even if there were, those two in the movie are not it. Sure, there's a lot that's new and different than when our parents or grandparents were our age, but they still dealt with the same shit. It reminds me of a great ad I saw for Canadian Club once in a magazine. It was a collection of vintage images of a late 60s tie-dye band and the tag was "Your Dad had groupies too. And he drank cocktails." The implication being that, before your spoiled, selfish, poo-spewing, burping, diaper-destroying ass came along that he was interesting too. If you prefer, think about Don Draper, the classiest Canadian Club customer ever - 36, a Madison Avenue executive - but with a life in existential shambles. Shit - the entire reason this blog exists is because I found out - gasp!- that my grandfather was not the perfect, loving, kind gentleman I worshipped as a kid. Being human hasn't changed.

Michael Lewis (of Money Ball and Liar's Poker fame) was on The Daily Show promoting his new book which is about parenthood and they made the observation that children are incomprehensibly resilient. John Stewart remarked " That's the point isn't it? I mean, they need to survive or the species goes away." Like all good jokes, it's right. Whatever your issues are - they aren't unique and short of terminal cancer you've got a shot to overcome them. We're designed to survive, make more of us, and if we're really lucky, we get to have a great time doing it. Get over yourself and start living.

Hiatus

"Mass media reaches its natural end state when we broadcast our lives instead of actually living them"

Shouldn't be a surprise but as I've not done anything worth writing about recently I'm not writing for a while.

I'll come back. I always do.

On Nuclear Disarmament and Defense Budget Priorities

Intellectually, I don't know what to make about President Obama's Nuclear Drawdown pledge.

My two hang-ups are that: 1) Nukes, particularly our constantly patrolling ballistic missile submarines, which are virtually undetectable, are a warm comforting blanket of deterance; and 2) as this article points out, eliminating nukes in and of itself, while laudable, will not magically rid the world of armed conflict.

Let's unpack both of those.

First - credible deterrents are a tricky thing. For one, you need the world to know you have them and that you're just crazy enough to use them if you need to. I think BHO would pull that trigger and have no regrets about it if he had to, but spending fresh diplomatic capital saying the opposite undermines the raison d'etre of nukes. The other issue is how small of a force constitutes a "credible" deterent?
The May 2002 SORT treaty outlines where the US arsenal is headed. I think it largely gets things right with regard to the structure of US forces, favoring subs over bombers over silos (in that order), reducing our MIRV ratio, and largely ignoring our tactical forward deployed nukes in western Europe. It also, integrally, allows the US to "de-alert" but not decommission or otherwise render inoperable up to an equivalent amount of strategic weapons in inactive reserve.

You might be asking yourself - does that really mean we're moving closer to a world without nukes? Yes, because it does take a hell of a lot of work to "turn on" a dead warhead. But, in a very Dr. Strangelove fashion, this makes feel safe at night.
Also - Subs and Bombers are inherently safer than silos. The added redundancy of the pilot and bombadier or the Skipper and XO, all alone making the inhuman decision, is important when we're talking about deploying nukes. Further - the stealth capabilities of a B-2 or Ohio class sub multiply the effective force of the deterrent. That in and of itself allows the US to lower the total number of weapons in the arsenal while still projecting a strong deterrent. To sum, I'm comfortable with the arsenal we have, the structure of the arsenal, and most importantly the safeguards we have regarding the release of that arsenal. I don't want it to go a changin'.

The second is, will eliminating nuclear weapons reduce armed conflict in the world? The answer is a definitive "no." Nukes raise the cost of direct armed action. Removing nukes lowers that cost. Lowering barriers to entry makes the option of direct armed action to achieve military or political ends all the more accessible. Now, I realize that this is an over-simplification of the "good fences make good neighbors" argument, but it is nonetheless true. Every single post Cold War conflict has been only in the realm of conventional forces, and typically of the low-intensity variety.

As horrible as a guerrilla war in Afghanistan or Somalia or Kosovo or Georgia is, that's still better than massed modern conventional forces squaring off, which is still better than the existential threat of nuclear annihilation. The simple fact is on the continuum of conflict, low-intensity wars are preferable to nuclear ones, any way you slice it. That low-intensity conflict has replaced nuclear conflict as our reality is a good thing, and just isn't possible when people aren't afraid to tangle.

Which brings me to my last point. The politics of Secretary Gates new Pentagon Budget are brilliant. By timing it 1) after the President's budget passed 2) while the President is overseas outlining his foreign policy doctrine, and 3) during the Easter recess, Gates and the WH have scored major victories in actually changing the way we protect ourselves. Further, while Members are home in their districts, they can play to their constituents first, and then come back to the hill and play ball. It gives cover to sympathetic members who actually disagree with their districts.

Again, I largely agree with the objectives laid out by Secretary Gates. It avoids the temptation to "run up the score" in conflicts the US would win anyways and focuses on reality far more than any defense budget probably ever has. This is a credible and common sense change that will eventually yield peaceful dividends.

One last thing. I know Barack Obama is a gen-X-er and grew up when the Terminator came out (and was about a year out of law school when T-2 premiered) but seriously? "Human Destiny is what we will make of it?" That's straight plagarism there.

Go Cards!

I've been laying low for a lot of reasons.

First - I haven't had that much to say. I've been doing some personal fiction prep
work like story ideas, character sketches, notes on dialogue, etc. but no real writing. So nothing new on the creative front.

Second - not much new on the personal front either. I went up for a short weekend in NYC last week and man do I love my close friends up there and the city. A lot of the things I was trying to knock around last year when I went up there just aren't issues anymore and the city is for me, this wondrous cacophony of sights, sounds, experiences, and opportunity waiting to be done. The flip side of the fear I had about the place last year has given way to an unabashed excitement. Also - I have one hell of a Geraldo Rivera story to tell too.

Third - a plug to two friends in Columbia MO. First is Nate C. Kennedy, who is doing a much better job putting out quality content on his blog than I am. I've become a regular poster over there and I have to hand it to Nate, I love being able to post on Missouri based political science topics, which I should probably post about more often. The other plug is for Ducks and Economics, a more wonkish blog on econolit. There's not a whole lot of content on their yet, but if I know the publisher as well as I think there's a lot of good nuggets coming.

Last - Congrats to MP on getting a new job! MP works with me right now but is moving on to bigger and better things shortly and I wish her all the best. She's one of the hardest workers I've ever had the pleasure of working with, and has a razor sharp sense of macabre humor. I've been shotgunning my resume to any job I'm remotely qualified for, and if you hear of an opening you'd think I'd be great at, don't hesitate to let me know. It's not out of a dissatisfaction for this place that I'm looking, just more out of the recognition that I need to take that next step career-wise.

hodgepodge of interesting things

It can't be the 3rd week in March without mentioning the following things.

1) It was my little brother's brithday this past week. Happy 21st Birtday CMG!

2) March Madness is upon us! Check Bernie Ball for what I'm sure promises to be more in depth reaction than I'm capable of giving. My bracket isn't busted - yet. I still have all 8 of my elite eight teams alive, but I also made the Faustian choice of picking the team I think can be the champs - Memphis - over my alma mater (Mizzou, if you were unaware). So far this year, this tourney has been unusually wide open, with even low seeds like Cal State Northridge challenging top seeds until the very end. It's been to fun to watch, and its only getting better.

3) Speaking of Basketball...read this and this. I was forwarded the first from a fmr HS football coach. He qouth "this is everything that is wrong with America. And why basketball sucks." I'm not sure if I'd go that far...for their parts Allonzo and his mother seem to be decent people, more at the mercy of carnivorous business interests than any kind of pernicious will. But the scathing fact remains: Basketball hasn't been Hoosiers for a long time - if ever. Also, about the Euro basketball leagues, I think that's a pretty good way of doing things and I wouldn't have a problem with talented - albeit immature and ill prepared - Highschoolers going that route. No one should be denied the ability to earn, and let's just face it, most HS athletes are not academically prepared for college. That has more to do with our broken educational system than anything else, but it does little good for anyone except CBS Sports' ratings to have a terrible student on a college campus.

4) As an avowed partisan, I'm inclined to trust the Obama administration and Treasury Secretary Geithner. And Geithner isn't getting an easy go of things - as if dealing with the most perilous economic situation since the 30s wasn't enough, he has to do it with one hand tied behind his back and ducking. But this invective - written by Umair Haque but channelling Nouriel Roubini and Taleb - is really hitting home with me. Every since becoming a fan of Umair's work, I've begun to subscribe to his thesis about how good companies will prevail in the edge economy and bad companies will falter. The Geithner plan, as he points out, not only does nothing to change the incentives of the game, but actively makes them worse. I don't want the guy's head on a plate or anything, but this is not change I can believe in.

5) Last - TV has been getting better. Or maybe it's just me, but it seems like a few short years ago, you wouldn't have had networks taking chances on shows like Friday Night Lights, Rescue Me, the recently ended Battlestar Galactica (hands down the best commentary on post 9/11 America) or my new obsession, Kings. All of which, incidentally, are available via Hulu for free, anytime, with limited commercial interruption.

Yglesias is on to something

As per usual, the best stats guy in the political universe puts things into context.

One of the most infuriating things about analyzing anything - whether it be politics, policy, financial markets, movies, sports, etc. - is that so many commentators, pundits, observers, critics either A) have no basis in the broad theoretical underpinnings of the subject or B) more perniciously, ignore them outright to advance their own biases.

Now, I think a certain amount of skepticism about the theories themselves is warranted, but in general, I think their usefulness in being able to rapidly and mostly accurately asses events far exceeds their shortcomings. When the model fails - then you look for a new one. But if you're ignoring the model in the first place, you have no idea you should be looking.

I see this constantly in my job with our clients. They see the noise, but have little means or desire to put the pieces of it together. That's what we get paid for, ostensibly.

A thought on running from an unlikely source

So this is something that, since I've moved into working in the professional perception business, has fascinated me.

But it occurred to me as I was walking home (sans iPod) that I use this at least semi-regularly in my own life for a constructive purpose.

I need you to accept as given that cyclic activities like walking, running, cyclic, rowing, and swimming have their own idiosyncratic cadences for optimum performance. The elites in their respective disciplines hit those rhythms consistently; amateurs do not.

In the end then, it's not even about raw endurance or maximal strength or power - but an acquired skill- that separates the best from the good.

Ergo - you want to be better (among other things) - focus on your speed at cadence.

Running with a few select tunes chosen specifically for their cadence, like Ryan Adam's So Alive, really helps me with this. The time in the song hits right at 90bpm - and if you run properly you have about 90 foot-strikes/min. I tried this out the other night and found that in one time through of the song I can run - at what looks like flat out (race pace) - for 3/4 of a mile with this - under my anaerobic threshold. That's a huge gain in efficiency from something that, because of the "soundtrack" I'm not even thinking about.

Just something to try out.