Dynamic Hypocrisy

I was talking to a Type B person about the quintessential Type A topic: productivity.

And I believe that things that my friend was seeing. That too often solutions tout themselves as the cure-all. And worse is how often I see well-meaning ideas get perverted into elaborate rituals and bedazzled shiny things.

Take bullet journaling, and the Instagram community of #bujo (short for the moniker.) It’s post after post showing pretty illustrations and overly neat penmanship. That seems to miss the intention for me. Getting lost in the process instead of employing a process to help you with the original problem at hand.

It speaks to me like how often a religion or institution gets hung up on the rules or rituals while forgetting the original intention. Samurai who get spend more time shows of flash rather than being a hired hand. The decades-long debate over whether if gelatin is kosher or not by rabbis.

I really respect the original holy texts as a fine attempts at being a framework for living well and almanac for the world. At the time, before knowledge of e.coli or bacteria, it probably was a sensible hypothesis that the mixing of different animals caused some people get sick. But at this point, surf-and-turf is a delicious dinner option.

Anyways, people across the expanse of history have done this, but it happens particularly quickly in today’s age. Trends like rediscovering yoga, or pushing “design thinking,” or any given diet–starts well-intended and honestly small and local. But eventually it seems newcomers get taught the process but not the intention. And something like meditation turns into YouTube channels and specialized mats and incense oils.

Of all the chatter from the “Crazy Rich Asians” film, what struck me was the notion that Asians/people of color/minorities needed more chances to be mediocre.

So much was straddled to that film to be great, to be the thing that changed the cultural landscape for minorities. That it was impossible for it to just be an average rom-com. That it couldn’t just be a popcorn flick.

And that spoke to the rarity of a pointedly Asian-oriented cultural object within the Western world. That given so few chances, that each shot had to be spectacular.

That applies to works by other racial groups, or by other cultures, or by women, or by sexual orientation.

It’s a stage of novelty instead of normalization.

By the same token, Will Ferrell’s “Holmes and Watson” sits at 10% on Rotten Tomatoes. Having made $38.4 million on a $42 million budget. Does it speak to an admonishment of a sensibility that hadn’t changed in 15 years? (It could just speak to the dearth of the comedic movie.)

But I would like to be optimistic in that while the onus of spectacular life-changing is relived from the works of minorities, the expectations of average work from the hegemonic group is being raised.

I’m most dangerous when I’m confident. 

In a way, that’s the ideal we extol. But:

I’m most dangerous when I’m full of hubris. 

When it comes to a new project, it’s a thin-edge line between experience and assumptions. 

The latter can be fatal.

So I try (try is the imperative word here) to remind myself to work from a position of ignorance. To look at things anew, and to investigate it pure. 

I ending about this a lot. I’ve written about this multiple times already, but it’s not dynamic hypocrisy for no reason.

So the harpsichord is a thing that looks like a piano, but it actually “plucks” the strings. Whereas the piano has hammers that strike the strings.

The harpsichord is older, but in the 18th century when the piano was invented–it would be essentially wiped out and replaced by the piano.

I think about musicians growing up at that inflection point. How I would have chosen which instrument to learn and master. 

Do I pick the more mature instrument that already has music for it, and has known qualities to build upon. Or do I pick the new-fangled thing that so much unknown potential, but is unfamiliar? 

On a macro level with my limited time in life, do I spend it refining and building upwards an established known thing like the harpsichord? Pushing the limits of what is known?

Or do I spend my life finding something new and novel to the musical world? That every discovery I made is new to the world too? It may ultimately be insignificant or small, but it’d be brand new to everyone.

I imagine the world of knowledge to be a city. And picking the harpsichord to take an existing building, and making it taller. And picking the piano to be building something new in the outskirts of the city. Expanding the boundaries of the city itself. 

I lean towards the piano, but it’s a thought exercise that guides my decisions. 

When is there a thing, and when is it too late to a part of it? The fear of missing out. The existential crisis of a generation.

But a different thing: when does a thing start? 

When does an era start? When does a trend start? What causes it?

What if it was supposed to be me? 

There’s the fear of missing out. But I might be starting to fear that I’m not the one who’s starting the thing that people fear missing out on. 

Over-wrought metaphor incoming.

Solid as a rock. Fluid like water. 

Thinking about cities I’ve lived in, I wonder about if they’re more like rocks or more like water. 

Minnesota feels a rock. The properties are known and familiar. Reliable in what you get. State Fair in the fall, Dairy Queen in the summer, cold as fuck in winter. 

Los Angeles feels like water. Or more like waves. It can be tricky to get around in the area, so you tend to ebb-and-flow. You plan a night out to go to K-town, hop around, and then you Lyft back home to chill. Then you found out next week there’s something in Los Felix or downtown, so you gather up your friends to flow to it before ebbing back to base.

But New York. What’s New York? Is it hard and thick-skinned like people say? So a rock? Or is it buzzing with so much that’s like water? Flowing into new trends, restaurants, and bars? 

I’d say it’s more like neither. It’s a gas. 

A gas fills out to the boundaries of the container you place it in.

So you can go really deep, tightly compressing it into small and intense experiences. Or go really wide, touching on a great many number of things all at once. The city never says no, only expanding or contracting to what you expect out of it. 

Although as I think about this, I wonder if I’m really talking about the cities themselves. But also myself, and how I am to the place I’m in, and the people I’m around, and what I expect out of myself. 

Thinking about late-night talk shows for some reason. And how Jimmy Fallon might have accidentally shepherded to its era’s close. 

Maybe Conan too. Conan just started a podcast where he’s doing long-form hour-long interviews, and it was a reminder of “oh yeah, late-night talk shows are of another time.” A time much closer to vaudeville than the media of today. 

Small isolated snippets of skits and interviews and music sewn together by a singular avatar called the host. 

As they all grappled with newer competitors from the internet, YouTube stars and tiny tweets and micro-videos from the defunct Vine and now Instagram stories. Fallon was the first of the hosts to take a flagship talk show, and attempt to compete. Creating micro-moments with sheer celebrity power, but in-essence was making two-minute clips of fun and whimsy to be shared.

And it worked. Except it’s more of troubled signal in-hindsight. Because he essentially atomized the show. You no longer needed to consume the show as a whole, you didn’t have to stay up to watch the Tonight Show as a whole episode, but rather bite-size clips on YouTube.

It feels more akin to someone selling their car for parts rather than selling it as a car. 

Meanwhile other mediums are taking the concepts, and stretching it. Podcasts take the interview to its logical extreme with minimal interruptions. Musicians re-take the drop and the moment to their own Instagram accounts. 

How the format of the late-night talk show evolves will be interesting to watch. (Or more likely not as it trudges on.) But there’s an opportunity of thought here: how to bring back the size of the functional unit back to a TV show?

Think about Breaking Bad. You’ll see a GIF here and there of moments. But no one would snip out two minutes, and anyone would go “That’s all the Breaking Bad I need, thank you.” No it’s functional unit size is a multi-season arc. At most, you might pick out an episode as a magical thing to have someone watch. But it still hints at something larger.

How do bring a format that’s being reduced to minutes back to something that has to be watched as an hour-long experience?

Continuing the line of thought, false empathy creates a wall. 

It creates an “us” and “them.” Not even an “us versus them.” But even at the simpler level, the othering is a reflective property.

By creating a separation, you yourself become the other to someone else. 

And that creates a tension for whatever you’re trying to do.

If you’re trying to establish that what you do or what you think is better or the only way, you open it up to also being deemed worse or it being the wrong way compared to other phenomenon. 

I was reading on how Western countries have been waiting on how China’s economic reforms to fail. The issue being that they’ve been waiting for decades now. 

The collective forgetfulness that Western ways of working were once new ideas themselves.

I think about two questions. “How many suns do we have?” [One?] and “How many stars are there?” [Billions]

Is our sun the absolute way to be a star? 

I saw a weird thing happen at work. A colleague used empathy as an offensive weapon.

A different team came in, and fairly aggressive and adamant about things. Leaving my team a bit confused about things.

So when we gathered into our meeting, that colleague attempted to explain what could have been happening to the lead of the other team.

“Don’t take it personally. We don’t know what’s going with her. She could be having a bad day or going through her own thing.”

What?

What does that have to do with anything with the work or collaboration?

It’s self-serving rationalizing and damaging speculation. It doesn’t push the needle anywhere. It’s just a weird way to soothe teammates by building walls. “We’re fine, they’re being bad.” 

Which seems fine, but ultimately doesn’t do a godamn thing. It doesn’t foster collaboration, it isn’t empathy–there’s no true attempt to figure out the situation. Just idle pointing at potential sources of tension, but nothing to actually solve that tension. 

It’s gossip under the guise of empathy, and it’s lazy at that. 

I saw the weirdest thing a while back. There was a person who was smart enough to know empathy. But too dumb to practice it in real-time.

This was in a business setting. And the client expressed displeasure at how she pointed out the contract. But instead of connecting to the client on the feeling and their point-of-view, she shallowly used empathetic language but didn’t actually engage. 

“I hear you.” Okay, decent start…

“But the terms of our…” Good lord, stop. 

Seeing this train wreck in real-time made me realize how dangerous it is when you think you have the tools of the moral high ground. 

It can make you look like a shit-head.